


Guys' Night Out

by RedPen



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types
Genre: Despair Era (Dangan Ronpa), Gen, fuyuhiko has a terrible horrible no good very bad day, izuru kamukura has a concussion and that's weird for everyone, kazuichi blows up two helicopters, one heckuva brot3
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-05-17
Packaged: 2019-04-16 07:09:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14159475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedPen/pseuds/RedPen
Summary: Lately, the Remnants of Despair have come to two realizations:One, that being best friends and being terrible people are not mutually exclusive.And two, that something is horribly wrong with Izuru Kamukura.





	1. Chapter 1

Kazuichi Soda woke.

There was a ringing in his ears, and somewhere nearby rang the high-pitched, shrieking sobs of a young girl screaming. Shooting pains were racing through his left leg.

“Shut up! I said SHUT UP!” said the blurry shape leaning over him, and smacked him. The screaming warbled a bit when the side of his head struck concrete. Ah. Right. So that was him.

He took a raw, gasping breath, and Fuyuhiko’s voice above him said, “If you start screaming again, I’m going to break your fuckin’ jaw, don’t think I won’t.”

Kazuichi clapped his mouth shut.

“GOD how’d this go so wrong?” Fuyuhiko grumbled. He was scowling, his eye focused on something outside of Kazuichi’s field of vision.

“The bomb was mistimed,” said a flat voice somewhere near that white-hot, stabbing area of the world that was Kazuichi’s leg. He tried to raise his head, and the yakuza pushed it firmly back into the floor, not even bothering to look at him.

“Wow, shit, yes, you think? You think the fuckin’ bomb might have been mistimed? That’s your logical fuckin’ deduction? What the hell would we do without you, Kamukura, and your amazing, brilliant, phenomenal skills of reason, figuring out that the BOMB WAS FUCKING MISTIMED?”

“You asked.” There was a sharp tug on Kazuichi’s leg (oh god, it was broken, it was SO broken, he could FEEL the jagged edges of his broken tibia rasp together) and he whimpered miserably, trying not to scream again, because a broken jaw would not improve this situation.

“Oh shut up, Kazuichi,” Fuyuhiko said again, losing steam. “It’s your own damn fault.”

The world was swimming slowly back into focus. It was dark - not night, but the kind of dusky, gloomy grayness of thick smoke and dust-choked air. Kazuichi was lying sprawled across a tiny island of bare concrete in a sea of rubble. Somewhere far, far above him, the grating creak of steel beams slowly bending echoed through the gaping, hollow cavern of an office building cored by explosives.

“Wha… wha’happen?” was the best Kazuichi could manage, because his head was still ringing and DAMN did his leg hurt.

“APPARENTLY, the bomb was mistimed!” said Fuyuhiko, in a tone of mock surprise. “Who do you think we should blame for THAT?”

“What? What, no! No way!” Kazuichi scrambled to prop himself up on his elbows, and got a brief, swimming glimpse of Izuru Kamukura splinting his leg with a rusted, broken length of metal and the ripped-off, bloodied sleeve of someone’s jacket. (None of theirs, but there was blood seeping through the piled-up rubble to his left and right, so surely there were a lot of jackets in this broken shell of a building that quite suddenly no one would be needing.) The ocean of pain rose up to meet him, and he found himself on the floor again, starbursts dancing in his vision. “AAAAAHHHG w-wait, wait, no, not screaming, not screaming, d-don’t break my jaw!”

“Just hold STILL,” Fuyuhiko commanded tiredly, resting the flat of his hand against Kazuichi’s shoulder and holding him against the chill floor again. Part of the yakuza’s shirt was burned away, Kazuichi realized, and where he could see the skin, there were angry red burn marks all up his arm.

“I…” he tried again, “I didn’t get the bomb wrong, there’s no WAY I got the bomb wrong, I checked and, and double checked and triple checked… this was IMPORTANT, man, you think, you think I’d, I’d get the bomb wrong when I KNEW how important-“

“Well the bomb was WRONG,” Fuyuhiko snapped. “Because if the bomb had been RIGHT, we would have been out of this shithole before it went off, huh? …You’re tearing up. Don’t you fuckin’ cry on me, Kazuichi, don’t you dare fuckin’ cry right now!”

“I’m not crying!! There’s… smoke! My eyes are watering! AGH, stop TUGGING ON IT!”

Fuyuhiko rolled his eye. “You hear that, Izuru? He doesn’t want it splinted. Guess he just wants to lie here and DIE ON THE FUCKING FLOOR.”

“Hm,” said Izuru, ignoring him.

“Seriously though, why are we even stopping to treat his leg? Be funny if it got infected and fell off.”

“It would be inconvenient if it fell off,” said Izuru.

“Oh, take a shot of despair once in a while. Your problem is that you’re incapable of having any goddamn fun.”

“And yours is that you never think of the big picture,” said Izuru, blandly.

“He’d still be useful with half the legs. He just needs to sit in a garage somewhere and build shit, I don’t know why we even bring him with us on these things. Come on, let’s just fuckin’ drag him. By the leg.”

“Never mind, splint the leg, splint the leg!” Kazuichi whined, and Fuyuhiko grinned briefly and gave his shoulder a little shove.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

They sat in silence for a moment while Izuru finished the splint, and then between the two of them Fuyuhiko and Izuru managed to hoist a sobbing and whimpering Kazuichi onto Izuru’s back, piggyback style. Izuru’s long hair was swept over one shoulder, out of the way, but what little of it Kazuichi could see was tangled beyond redemption and matted with grease and dirt and blood.

“D’you ever wash this?” he murmured into the back of Izuru’s neck, lightheaded and loopy with pain. “Or, like, comb it, ever?”

“You’re delirious,” Izuru said shortly.

“Yeah but DO you?”

“No. It’s monotonous to keep it up every day.” Izuru started walking in a random direction, and Kazuichi rested his head heavily on the other boy’s shoulder.

“Hah. Gross. Amiright, Fuyuhiko? It’s gross. Des… despairingly gross.”

Ah yes, there it was, setting in with beautiful dependability: the fantastic, _fantastic_ drug that was Despair. It didn’t make the pain go away, but somehow it pushed it past some white-hot threshold into rapture. His bomb was a disappointing embarrassment, everyone was furious at him, his leg was broken and it was all he could do not to pass out from the pain that shot through him every time Izuru took a step. Kazuichi half sobbed, half laughed weakly, and Fuyuhiko rolled his eye again, falling into step beside Izuru.

“Well, he’s out of it.”

“Hm.”

“Alright, we’ve gotta get out of here. The Fuck-up Foundation is gonna be swooping down on this place any second to take care of cleanup duty, and I don’t wanna be hanging around when they get here.”

________________

Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu picked his way slowly through the rubble.

It had been a _simple, unfuckupable_ plan. They’d meant to sneak out through the underground parking garage, long before their bomb went off a few stories up, but the exits here were long since buried by an avalanche of rubble. The worst of the wreckage was several stories high; a mountain of steel and concrete and glass and blood and bodies and slowly smoking ashes. The building creaked ominously above them.

They weren’t the only ones still alive, of course. As the wreckage slowly settled there were distant groans, curses, quiet sobbing. A woman, her lower body pinned by a slab of concrete, blood slowly leaking through the dust beneath her, reached out desperately at Fuyuhiko’s ankle as he passed. Distracted and still fuming over Kazuichi’s failure, he kicked her hand away. Izuru, walking a little behind him and burdened by Kazuichi’s dead weight, stepped down hard on her head. Her whimpering went abruptly silent.

“Ugh, when they’re that pathetic, just let them die slowly,” Fuyuhiko grumbled. “We aren’t fuckin’ angels of mercy over here.”

Slowly, they made their way up a steep slope of debris. On what had probably been the fourth floor, Fuyuhiko pulled himself up over the crumbling lip of the massive hole in the floor, and saw a thin glimmer of warm yellow light.

“There’s a window up here,” he called down to Izuru, who was standing with Kazuichi atop the pile of rubble just beneath him. There was the grating sound of Fuyuhiko shifting debris around, and suddenly a shaft of sunlight was streaming down through the smoke. Izuru, standing in darkness, stuck his hand into it and watched with a vague blankness as sunlit motes of dust and flakes of ash eddied randomly around his fingers. Fuyuhiko shuffled around above.

“Aw, shit.”

He was peering out without being seen, his back pressed to the wall beside the window. There was enough screaming panic below to send a little shock of pleasure through him, but Future Foundation helicopters were already swooping down like loud, black, inconvenient vultures. Cursing silently, he crept back toward the gaping cave they’d blasted into the building.

“The-“

“Future Foundation is here, yes, I know,” said Izuru, sounding bored. “It’s well within the parameters of their usual response time. And I can hear the helicopters.”

“Yeah, and what the hell are we gonna do about that, huh? Not exactly easy to sneak out of a fourth floor window with them buzzing around.” He sighed and sat down on the edge of what was left of the floor, his legs dangling down into the abyss below. “Damn, I didn’t even bring a gun, I’ve got a…” He wrapped his fingers around the hilt of the concealed blade tucked into the back of his belt. “…Got a fuckin’ _bowie knife._ This was supposed to be _covert_.”

“I timed the bomb right,” Kazuichi moaned. “Not my fault. Didn’t mess up.”

“And now we’re gonna have to fight our way out dragging THAT around.” Fuyuhiko gestured at Kazuichi, torn between fury and defeat. “Do some mental calculations for me. How much better are our chances if we leave him to die?”

“Y-you’re not leaving me to die! Right? You’re just saying that?”

“Oh, shut UP, Kazuichi.” Fuyuhiko dropped back down onto the rubble next to Izuru. “Okay. Okay, we’re gonna fuckin’ handle this like adults. The plan is-“

“They don’t know we’re here,” said Izuru.

“Don’t you fuckin’ interrupt me! I’m in charge, alright?”

Izuru gave him a cold look.

“What?? Fuckin’ what, Izuru?”

“Inserting ‘fucking’ into every sentence isn’t making you sound less shellshocked and on the verge of panic. It’s an obvious tell that you’re stressed and acting tough to cover for it, and it’s annoying.”

Izuru caught Fuyuhiko by the arm, a spit second before the bowie knife would have shish-kebab’d his face. He wrapped his fingers around Fuyuhiko’s burned wrist with a slow, calculated pressure. Fuyuhiko hissed through gritted teeth.

“F- Fuck!”

“Try some synonyms.”

“FUCK,” he said louder, and Izuru sighed resignedly and let got of his wrist. Fuyuhiko let the knife drop to his side, his anger fizzling out. Might as well be furious at a brick wall, for all the good it did directing his emotions at Izuru Kamukura.

“That’s a second degree burn.”

“I fu- …I know it’s a burn! I was aware that it was there! It was actually pretty hard to miss, when a big slab of burning drywall fell on it! Have you got anything fu- anything _useful_ to contribute here?”

“They don’t know we’re here,” Izuru repeated, instantly losing interest in both the confrontation and the burn. “They’ll assume this went the way it was supposed to, and we’re long gone. They don’t know the building exploded while we were still inside it.”

“Well… yeah. Of course they think that.”

“So,” Izuru prompted, flatly, almost seeming annoyed at having to spell this out, “ _They’re not looking for us._ We can lay low until they leave.”

“Oh! Yeah! Screw fighting our way out, let’s just wait.”

“Like that plan,” Kazuichi muttered weakly. “Like that plan a lot. Good plan.”

“You would, you fu- …you coward.”

“If that’s your plan, then,” said Izuru, with every bit of his usual emotionlessness. “You’re in charge.”

“Wow. WOW. Izuru Kamukura, that was _sarcasm_.”

________________

Izuru Kamukura calculated.

They were camped out there on the fourth floor, sitting by the window and waiting while their shaft of light slid slowly upward and reddened in the dying light. The helicopters still thrummed outside, and a ways below them was the sound of Future Foundation rescue workers sifting through the detritus of their attack.

Working their way upwards. Ten minutes before this little hiding spot was discovered. Less, if they correctly identified the injuries of the woman whose head he’d crushed, and narrowed their search. The introduction of that variable made the whole thing a little more interesting, a little harder to calculate. But the waiting was dull. Like a radio tuning out, Izuru lost interest. 

His eyes shifted slowly to Kazuichi and Fuyuhiko.

Pain, too, was a hard thing to calculate. A pleasant unknown, in a world of flat, predictable order. Fuyuhiko was sitting sullenly against the wall and cradling his rapidly blistering arm. (He’s trying not to be obvious about it. Trying by habit to balance those specific societal expectations that fit neatly together into the persona of a yakuza, and forbid him from showing any weakness. But his teeth are clenched a little too tightly, and his posture is tense and withdrawn. It’s a shame we as a culture have no quantitative measurement for pain.) Kazuichi, propped up next to him, was white faced and barely conscious, murmuring faintly to himself. (Dreaming of a father who used to batter and break him; that much is easy to predict. How boring.)

Again, what had briefly seemed interesting slipped away, and left his head a dull, white void. Izuru stared blankly ahead.

“What are you looking at?” Fuyuhiko grumbled.

“Nothing.” Roughly nine minutes now, based on sounds of the rescue effort below. (He’s going to assume I’m concerned about his burn, and get defensive. “My arm is fine.”)

“My arm’s fine, alright?” Fuyuhiko spat, and shifted his body to hide the blistering skin from Izuru’s line of vision. Izuru averted his eyes, and stared at a spot on the cracked and crumbling drywall instead. (How long before the building itself loses structural integrity and collapses completely? Interesting. Requires Architect, Physicist, Demolitionist, miscellaneous others. Remember blueprints, building codes, era of construction, placement of incendiary devices. Start calculations on that.)

“Ugh, screw Kazuichi, seriously,” said Fuyuhiko, nudging Kazuichi’s broken leg with a knee and getting a pained whimper out of him. “How the hell do you mess up your own talent this much?”

(He’s found the puzzle,) Izuru thought, interest briefly flaring. (The contradiction between what should have happened, and what did. Can he solve it?) “How do you think?” he said aloud.

Fuyuhiko glared at him. “Heh, bet you already know, with that six million dollar brain of yours. You’ve probably already figured out exactly what went wrong.”

“Yes. I know what went wrong.”

“Well good fuckin’ job warning us about it!”

“Hm.”

“S… sabotage,” Kazuichi managed, eyes still closed.

(Bingo.)

“Don’t you shift the blame like that,” Fuyuhiko growled.

(Frustration,) Izuru thought, in between math equations. (Will manifest in mockery. Anger. Will peter out with doubt.)

“Oh, it’s not my fault you guys, I got the bomb right you guys. The HELL you did,” Fuyuhiko mocked, venting to himself more than to Izuru. “He’s gonna sit there and claim he didn’t screw up this whole thing, like the bomb just MAGICALLY went off? I mean, is he just incompetent, or is he actively trying to sabotage us, here?” He sighed; deflated a bit. 

(Doubt. “Maybe it really was just an accident.”)

“I dunno… maybe he’s right. Maybe it really was just an accident. Shoddy wires or something. I just… this was supposed to be easy. You know? This was supposed to be a fun one.”

(He’s incorrect,) thinks Izuru. (An easy puzzle, but in the end he couldn’t solve it. Boring. “Peko is going to kill me.”)

“Heh, if I survive this, Peko’s gonna kill me for doing this without her-”

“Can you shut up?” Izuru said blandly, still mentally calculating the odds of the building falling on them. It wasn’t as if he needed the silence, but he knew exactly how Fuyuhiko was going to process this whole situation. He didn’t need to hear it twice.

Fuyuhiko’s eye widened, slowly turning livid. “What, am I distracting you from staring at nothing?”

“You’re just boring me. You don’t need to speak.”

(He’s favoring his burnt side, so he’ll swing the knife with his left arm. The torso would be ideal… no, he’ll go for my face again, and won’t care that he’s being predictable. He wants to maim, not kill. It’s an empty gesture of dominance, a display of discontent. He’s already expecting me to catch it.) Izuru, still sitting calmly against the wall, caught Fuyuhiko’s wrist again as the yakuza lunged across the floor. His good arm, this time. (He’s learning.)

“Hmph.” Fuyuhiko wrenched his arm free and sat back again, sullen.

The last set of calculations finished, and a timer began to tick down inside Izuru’s head. His eyes flickered upwards toward the ceiling - the creaking, groaning strain of metal on metal. Waiting. _Expectant._ Yes, right about… now would probably be the most entertaining time to drop this little factoid. He looked back calmly to Fuyuhiko, still sulking against the far wall.

“I’m going to share two interesting facts with you,” he said.

“I cannot fuckin’ wait,” the yakuza answered, deadpan.

“The first,” said Izuru, that clock in his head ticking rapidly, “Is that in roughly five seconds, this building is going to lose all structural integrity and collapse on us.”

For a split second, Fuyuhiko’s mouth flapped open in a wordless gape, and before he could stammer up the inevitable, baffled “what the hell” that Izuru could already see forming in his head, Izuru was powering on ahead of him with: “And the second, is that I’m the one who sabotaged our bomb.”

Fuyuhiko’s furious scream was drowned out by the shrieking scrape of something precarious and vital finally folding in on itself and snapping, and as the yakuza leapt forward, knife first, the floor beneath them heaved in time with a sudden, accelerating roar of cascading thunder: several hundred thousand tons of metal, concrete, and glass avalanching down on top of them.

(He’d been right. It really was interesting, right up until very suddenly, it wasn't.)

________________

Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu opened his eye with a groan.

He was outside, the sinking sun a pale red half-dome on the horizon of a sky choked white with pollutants and dust. The helicopters still hummed in the distance, and there were shouts, the sounds of surviving rescue workers and injured innocents scrambling back into some semblance of order. He could see none of it through the reddish haze of dust still hanging thick in the air. It was all very far away, somewhere outside of Fuyuhiko’s aching, stunned little world half buried in rubble.

“…He threw me,” Fuyuhiko mouthed disbelievingly, as memory crawled slowly back. “I jumped at him with the knife and he just grabbed me and _threw me out the window_.” And, as he sat upon slowly, dirt and detritus showering off of him, he had to admit that the timing, the strength, the angle of the throw, had been perfect. His descent had been hidden from the Future Foundation’s eyes by the billowing clouds of dust thrown up as the building fell, and somehow, he’d fallen four stories and landed miraculously unscathed. “Fuckin’ Izuru Kamukura.”

The sounds of pained sobbing, interspersed with bouts of frantic giggles, led Fuyuhiko to Kazuichi, who was curled up in the fetal position a few yards away, eyes wide and swirling with the madness of despair. Fuyuhiko stumbled over to him through the piles of debris. Reached out to shake him by the shoulder, was met only with more gibbering.

“Come on, snap out of it. Kazuichi. Kazuichi Soda, wake the hell up and tell me where Izuru is.”

Kazuichi giggled again, eyes rolling back into his head, and Fuyuhiko threw up his hands in defeat. “Fine. You know what? I’m leaving you here.”

He walked away.

He walked back and, with quite a lot of effort, hooked his good arm under one of Kazuichi’s and started to drag him.

“Taking you to Mikan. Better than you deserve.”

After a moment, in a voice strained with exertion, he amended that with: “Okay. The bomb wasn’t your fault. You did… fuckin’ okay. I guess.”

Another slow moment of dragging the mechanic across the ground, navigating through piles of wreckage, twisted chunks of rebar and concrete bigger than the both of them.

“…Don’t let the compliment go to your head.”

They made it a few more yards when Fuyuhiko spied Izuru Kamukura pulling himself free of yet another massive heap of what used to be office building. “Hold that thought,” he told Kazuichi breathlessly, letting him drop the ground again. “IZURU KAMUKURA YOU _BASTARD!!_ ”

Izuru looked up blankly just in time to see Fuyuhiko careen into him in an enraged tackle, wrapping his arms around Izuru’s abdomen and sending them both sprawling to the ground. Another little cloud of dust was kicked up around them. Izuru, lying on his back, blinked at him slowly.

“You… you sabotaged the bomb? You fuckin’ SABOTAGED THE GODDAMN BOMB!! Why? Why the hell?? Because you were bored, because it’d only be _interesting_ if there was a risk of _fiery explosive death?_ ” Izuru was still staring at him, silent, and a hysterical laugh crept into Fuyuhiko’s voice, riding the wave of anger and resignation and despair that was rapidly creeping up from the pit of his stomach. Because of course that was why. Of course Izuru would do this; this whole misadventure was essentially just one of Izuru’s goddamn Soaps.

“I don’t even know why I’m surprised! Don’t even know why I’m mad! Of course Izuru Kamu-fucking-asshole-kura got bored and tried to get us killed, why else would you even have come? I was _stupid_ to think you just wanted to have a good time, blow up a few buildings with us, ruin somebody’s day. Izuru Kamukura doesn’t do _guys! Night! Out!!_ ”

He pulled back his good arm, a furious, heavily telegraphed punch that was more show and strutting than an actual attempt at vengeance, but Fuyuhiko threw all his weight into the followthrough anyway, because screw Izuru. Izuru’s hand came up to catch his wrist again, just a second too late, and Fuyuhiko’s own hand shot past it and punched Izuru in the jaw, hard enough to make his own knuckles sting and Izuru’s head snap to the side and smack against the ground. 

Fuyuhiko, still sort of straddling Izuru, realized he was was breathing hard; they both were. Somewhere nearby, Kazuichi gave a sharp bark of laughter that turned into a sob as he bit it off.

“You hit me,” said Izuru.

“You deserved it, and you _let me_ hit you.”

Izuru slowly propped himself up on one elbow, staring down blankly at the hand he’d started to raise to stop Fuyuhiko. “You _hit_ me?”

“Yeah, I fuckin’- What the hell, Izuru, you didn’t have to take the punch if you didn’t want to. You never do anything you don’t want to, which is one of the many qualities that make you the most infuriating and terrible person on the planet.”

Izuru blinked again, slowly and deliberately, and it seemed suddenly to Fuyuhiko that he looked less blank and more dazed. “You hit me,” Izuru repeated, the words slurring slightly, and the burning, growing rage careening down the highway that was Fuyuhiko’s hindbrain hit an abrupt speedbump and flipped its car.

“You… did let me hit you, right?”

A drop of blood ran down Izuru’s brow, leaving a thin red trail that ended when it got caught up against a long, matted hank of bangs. Izuru touched it and pulled his hand away, staring at the blood on his fingertips. Dazed had become confused. “Something…” he began, faintly, “Something hit me, when the building came down. I’m… disoriented.”

“Shit,” whispered Fuyuhiko.

“I’m going to throw up,” announced Izuru, with significantly less confusion, and “SHIT,” said Fuyuhiko again, scrambling off of him and grabbing a handful of Izuru’s hair, yanking it quickly out of the way as Izuru leaned over and retched up the contents of his stomach. With the hair pulled aside, Fuyuhiko could suddenly see it clearly: the thin, silvery scar running just below Izuru’s hairline, now split open and rapidly welling up with red as another few lines of blood joined the first.

“Oh, that can’t be good.” The anger had petered out entirely, making way for the beginning tendrils of panic. Because saboteur or not, Izuru was far too valuable an- (Ally? Co-worker?) -an _asset_ for this to be happening on Fuyuhiko’s watch. One hand still holding Izuru’s hair back, Fuyuhiko squatted down in front of him. “Hey. Hey, how many fingers am I holding up?”

“All of them.”

“Yeah, well, that hand’s burned, I don’t want to bend them. Hey, no, look at me. Tell me what year it is, or who the Prime Minister is or some crap.”

Izuru dazedly put a hand to his temple again, wiped away the blood that was streaming down his face. “I should have been able to… to keep track of the trajectory of… even if I missed something, my luck… This shouldn’t have been able to happen.”

“ _Focus_ , you asshole! What’s your name, give me your name.”

Izuru looked up at him at last, eyes utterly distant and disoriented. “H… Hajime… Hinata?”

“Yeah, shit, wow, that is definitely a bad sign.”

Izuru threw up again.

Panic crawled upward from Fuyuhiko’s gut. Despair as well, writhing and wretched and inviting, but the yakuza pushed it back again, forcefully. He was now officially the least injured person in the group. He could not afford to follow Kazuichi into the glorious high of Junko’s Glorious Low. And he needed to prove a point to Izuru Kamukura about his ability to prioritize the big picture once in a while, there was always that. “Okay, well, I’m still pissed at you and when all this blows over we are going to have WORDS. But at this point I’m pretty satisfied to call this reaping what you sow, so… stay there for a second and enjoy your karma. I’ll be right back, and we’ll… figure out how to get you both to Mikan, I don’t know.”

He stood up, walked a few feet toward Kazuichi, and then looked back over his shoulder anxiously. Izuru had managed to push himself upright, and was sitting with his forehead on his knees, his shoulders rising and falling just a little too rapidly. “Your own damn fault,” he emphasized, without much conviction.

When he turned back around, there were figures emerging from the haze of dust just beyond where Kazuichi was twitching on the ground. Three of them, in snazzy but homogenized black suits with that stupidly sci-fi silver logo on the lapels, the rest of their bodies hidden by steel toed boots, gas masks, and heavy work gloves.

“Oh,” said Fuyuhiko.

“Shit,” said Fuyuhiko.

His hand strayed to the knife at his back, gripped the handle tensely. They were closer to Kazuichi than he was. One of the rescue workers waved.

“-Told you I heard somebody over here. Hey, don’t panic! We’re with the Future Foundation, we’re here to help,” the one who’d waved called out, completely and utterly failing to recognize three of the Remnants of Despair.

(And why should they? The identities of the Remnants of Despair were not common knowledge. Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu was the name of a missing, presumed dead high school student, not a global terrorist.)

Fuyuhiko swallowed stiffly, wondering if, with his injured arm, he could fatally stab them all fast enough to stop one of them from screaming and bringing the rest of the Future Foundation down on their heads. His tension must have been broadcasting pretty clearly, because the Future Foundation goon who’d spoken quickly raised their hands in a placating gesture, as if he were a frightened animal. “I swear, it’s okay. You’re gonna be okay. We’ve got a shelter set up near here; there’s food and water and medical supplies. You’re gonna be okay now.”

Fuyuhiko’s eye flickered from Kazuichi, curled up and whimpering, to Izuru, blood still rushing down his forehead and staining the knees of his pants as he pressed his face to them. And his own arm was burning, threatening to drag him under with despair, and Mikan Tsumiki… 

…was a long ways away.

His hand slowly loosened on the hilt of the bowie knife.

“My…" (Allies? Co-workers?) "My _friends_ are hurt. Bad. The whole place came down and we… We need help.” Fuyuhiko took a shaky breath, wiped sweat and dirt from his face, allowed the panic he’d been fighting to stain his voice. Just another frightened survivor. “Damn but we really need help.”


	2. Chapter 2

Kazuichi Soda fished the last colorful Sharpie out of the depths of his jumpsuit pockets, and fanned them all out in a rainbow in front of him. “Hey, pick one. You should sign my cast.”

“What are you, twelve? Don’t be a dumbass,” said Fuyuhiko, without looking up from the antiseptic-smelling aloe cream he was carefully smearing across his blistered right arm. “I’m not signing your cast.”

Fuyuhiko’s metal folding chair was set up next to the cot where Kazuichi was lying on his back. The clean white canvas of one of the Future Foundation’s big and boxy medical tents stretched above them, lit from within by emergency fluorescents and a happily purring generator, but the open flaps at the far end displayed the pressing blackness of another starless, moonless night, courtesy of the ruined atmosphere that was some of Kazuichi’s best work.

This tent was for the victims not hurt badly enough to require constant supervision, which was why an understaffed and unprepared Future Foundation had left them alone. His cot was one of many; all around them the survivors of today’s spectacular performance lay groaning in pain, or tossing and turning in fitful sleep, or (and these were Kazuichi’s favorite) deathly pale and still and silent. In a building of a few thousand people, there’d been enough of them left alive to fill only three medical tents.

Despite the little timing hiccup, it really had been an awesome bomb.

“Embarrassed about your handwriting?” he prodded. “Everybody’s writing looks bad with the other hand. You’re burned, people will get it. C’mon, pick a color. It’s traditional. Like in movies, when they break a bottle of champaign against a boat.”

“Why the fuck are you talking about boats? What kind of pain meds did they even put you on?”

“No, it’s like, before the boat goes out on its maiden voyage, you have to smash a bottle on it? Like, I dunno, you can’t sail an unsmashed boat. You can’t just _wear_ an unsigned cast, man. People will think you have no friends.”

“Good, ‘cause you have no friends,” grunted Fuyuhiko, squeezing another glob of aloe into his palm. 

“That’s mean, y’know? That’s low. You didn’t need to say that, and then you went and said it. Acting like a jerk to overcompensate for your crappy handwriting.”

With a silent scowl, Fuyuhiko wiped the aloe on his shoulder, grabbed a sharpie at random (the blue one, cool) and scrawled a shaky “FUCK YOU” across the garishly lime green cast encasing everything below Kazuichi’s knee and clashing horrendously with the yellow of his jumpsuit. Kazuichi grinned and shoved the rest of the markers back into a pocket.

“See? One friend. With surprisingly readable handwriting.”

Fuyuhiko threw the blue Sharpie at him. “Fuck you. Do I want to know why you carry ten markers around with you at all times?”

“In case I need to write something? Do you not? Hey, lifehack for you, then. Step one, deep pockets.” He half pulled out a monkey wrench, just to show it off. “Step two, a heckuvalot of small, useful crap.”

“ _You’re_ small, useless crap, Kazuichi-“ Fuyuhiko began, but went abruptly silent, shoulders tensing, as someone entered the tent. Careful of his leg, Kazuichi lifted himself up just enough to peer curiously around Fuyuhiko, at the Future Foundation woman walking towards them with a metal tray full of steaming mugs in her arms.

From this vantage point, Kazuichi could see Fuyuhiko’s hand carefully set down the aloe lotion and stray slowly backwards toward the knife hidden at the back of his waistband. (But not hidden _well_ , weirdly enough. The Future Foundation had to have noticed it, and just hadn’t cared to confiscate it. This world was full of jumpy people armed to the teeth, these days. So far, it had mostly just earned him a lot of sympathetic looks.) He stopped short of actually grabbing it, and exhaled slowly as the woman addressed them in voice kept low to avoid disturbing the other survivors.

“Doing okay in here, boys? Looks like you’re still the only two awake in this tent.” Without the gas mask, her helpful, cheerful demeanor was betrayed somewhat by a forced, fake smile with a mountain of stress behind it.

“Yeah, the neighbors haven’t been too talkative,” Fuyuhiko said irritably, and Kazuichi snorted.

The smile flickered uncertainly for a moment, returned. “I brought you some hot cocoa. Thought it might make everything just a little bit easier.”

“Oh hell yeah!” Kazuichi rocketed into a sitting position and grabbed a mug eagerly.

“Easier,” echoed Fuyuhiko.

Again, that slip of the smile. “And… I was hoping I could talk to you, maybe take some names down, see if we could get in contact with your families and let them know you’re still alive-”

“How many people died today?” the yakuza asked, coldly, and Kazuichi wondered why he cared. Tallying up their stats, maybe?

The smile was back: a plastic mask on a tired face. She picked up a mug and held it out to Fuyuhiko, a peace offering. “Ah, well, you need to be resting right now. We’re going to keep searching, so there’s no official count as of yet, but we’ll tell you as much as we can once you’ve had a chance to-“

“Thousands?” said Fuyuhiko, the cocoa untouched. Kazuichi took a large slurp of his own and watched the show. “Pretty much everybody who worked in that building, right? And how many of your guys? People just trying to rescue everybody, dig them out and drag them somewhere safe, people who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time when the whole damn building came down. Probably a lot of fuckin’ friends of yours. But no, yeah, chocolate’s gonna fix that. Thanks, I feel a shitton better already.”

The woman opened her mouth. Closed it. Had nothing to say, no way to respond to that dark, despondent reality. “We… there’s only so much we can do,” she managed, finally. “We’re doing what we can. We’re all just doing what we can.”

“Yeah, I believe you.” Fuyuhiko leaned back against the worn metal back of his folding chair and closed his singular eye. “I absolutely believe the Future Foundation has not one iota of fuckin’ power to stop shit like this from going down. But hey, you’re doing good work. You’re passing out hot cocoa. Feel real goddamn good about yourself, I really mean that.” The eye opened again, narrow and evaluating.

The Future Foundation woman stared down at him, teeth worrying anxiously at her lower lip, her face suddenly a decade wearier. Something dark and suffocating had poured from Fuyuhiko’s mouth, fogged her brain and coiled up behind her eyes.

“Hey, sorry, don’t mind me,” said Fuyuhiko with a shrug of fake nonchalantness. “Just having a shitty day. Go pass out your chocolate.” He calmly took the mug from her hands.

If she’d left the tent any faster, she would have been running. Kazuichi caught a glimpse of her scrubbing tears furiously from her eyes with a sleeve before she vanished into the night outside, and he grinned around his mug, shoulders shaking.

“What? What the fuck is so funny?” Fuyuhiko snapped at him. “I actually am having a real shitty goddamn day, if you hadn’t fuckin’ noticed.”

“Hah, no man, it’s just…” Kazuichi snorted with laughter. “The Future Foundation is giving us cocoa. The _Future Foundation_. Is giving _us_. _Cocoa_. They _caught the Remnants of Despair_ , and the first thing they did was say, well crap, man, let’s give them some cocoa-“

Fuyuhiko’s mug smashed against the ground at the same time as his fist smashed against Kazuichi’s face. Kazuichi whined offendedly, clapped a hand to his cheek. “W-what was _that_ for?”

When he turned his head, the yakuza’s face was inches from his own, leaning over his cot with a dark and furious scowl. “Are you,” he hissed, “An idiot?”

“That _hurt_ , man. I dunno why you gotta be so _violent_ -”

“Shut _up_ , Kazuichi.” Fuyuhiko grabbed the front of his jumpsuit, fingers still greasy with aloe. His voice was a low rasp, an angry whisper, just on the edge of comprehensible, and his one uncovered eye was darting around to glare at the other cots as if daring someone to be awake. “For once in your life, just shut up before you say one thing too many! Just fuckin’ announcing out loud that we’re… who we are, right in the middle of a Future Foundation camp? Do you have a fuckin’ _deathwish_ or do you actually think you can fight your way out on a broken leg? Tell me that, smartass.”

Kazuichi scowled at him, filed teeth gritted, and matched Fuyuhiko’s volume. “Nobody heard me. I’m not scared of the Future Foundation.”

“Well you SHOULD be. She was prying for our names, dipshit. They probably already suspect something. We’re hornets in the fuckin’ beehive, Kazuichi, and right now the bees don’t know who we are, but the only way we’re getting out of here alive is if they _continue_ to not know who we are.”

“She wasn’t, like, _prying_ , man. She was being friendly!” Kazuichi drummed his fingers against his mug anxiously, unsure of that. Going over the conversation again in his head. “Y-yeah? They’re the Future Foundation. The good guys. They’re not gonna lie about that stuff.” A pause in which Fuyuhiko glared at him, and then he burst out, loud and apprehensive: “I mean, who can you trust if you can’t trust the _Future Foundation_?”

“You… you actually ARE an idiot.”

“You brought us here,” Kazuichi spat back in a tone halfway between defensive and accusatory. “You think I was so out of it I didn’t notice that? You let them take us!”

Fuyuhiko ground his teeth and tightened his grip on his fistful of Kazuichi’s jumpsuit. There was a tense moment, a thrumming string on the verge of snapping. And then he let go slowly and leaned back in his chair again, looking indescribably exhausted.

“What was I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know, okay,” Kazuichi muttered resentfully, hot chocolate held protectively close to his chest. “You’re the idea guy. You’re in charge. You coulda done anything.”

“Like run for it and left you both? Yeah. Coulda done that. Definitely thought about it.”

Silent, Kazuichi finished his cocoa, eyeing Fuyuhiko’s handwriting on his cast over the rim, the blue sharpie lying forgotten atop a tangle of itchy brown-green rescue blanket. The lights in here were too stark, too bright. Fuyuhiko’s face was turned away from him, staring out into the wall of night.

“…You wouldn’t have, though. Right?”

Fuyuhiko stood up.

“W-whoa, man, where are you going?” Kazuichi leaned forward so quickly he nearly overbalanced and fell off his cot. The whole thing rocked unsteadily for a moment. His mug, too, hit the floor and cracked.

“To check on Izuru. Don’t blow a gasket.” Fuyuhiko glanced back at him. He looked… not angry. Just tired. “And try not to open your mouth and make noises with it while I’m gone.”

“You mean, don’t talk to anybody?”

“I know what I said.”

Suddenly panicking, leaning out as far as he could, Kazuichi reached out and grabbed the back of the yakuza’s suit. He swallowed nervously. “You’re coming back, right? You’re not just saying that, and then you and Izuru are gonna walk out of here without me, ‘cause you can walk and I can’t and your… your chances are better without me? T-that’s not what you’re doing, right?”

He let go with a yelp and snapped his hand back as the bowie knife very nearly came down on his fingers. The cot rocked again. Fuyuhiko threw the knife showily into the air, caught it, and shoved it back into his belt. “Oh my god, Kazuichi. Grow a spine.”

A second later, he’d tossed a cellphone into Kazuichi’s lap, and the mechanic gave another little start of surprise.

“That’s the stupid burner phone that’s our line to Peko. Been dead since the bomb went off. Use some of that pocket junk and fiddle with it for a while, yeah?”

Kazuichi nodded fervently, his brain already getting sidetracked by wires and circuitboards. “Yeah. Yeah! I’ll fix it for you.”

“Break a leg,” said Fuyuhiko waving his good arm vaguely, and he walked across the tent and stepped out into the darkness. In his black pinstripe suit, he instantly melted away.

Kazuichi took a deep breath. Picked up the cheap clamshell phone. Cradled it in both hands like something injured and delicate, something important. Fuyuhiko _would_ come back for his phone, right? He HAD to come back for his phone. Yeah. He’d come back. Everything was fine.

Against the numbing painkillers, despair prickled at the back of his mind.

________________

Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu strode fast and solemn across the sprawling camp of Future Foundation tents that had been hastily erected in the city streets in the wake of their bomb. Nobody stopped him. As the Ultimate Yakuza he exuded an aura that didn’t _expect_ anyone to. He belonged here; he was top dog everywhere he went.

In the dim backglow of a few dozen emergency spotlights illuminating the distant wreckage, Fuyuhiko took stock of the situation. Future Foundation lackeys present: more than he was comfortable with. About a dozen people were still sifting through the rubble, late into the night. Back at camp, he’d counted six or seven medical personnel and another dozen miscellaneous, probably more rescue workers too tired or injured to search, maybe a few helicopter pilots. Loose knots of shellshocked survivors, who he counted only because if things went south, they’d probably get in the way. And of course, security. Entirely too many tough-looking bastards with guns, some standing in a loose ring on the outskirts of camp, others patrolling in disciplined patterns. (You know, in case the Remnants of Despair show up. Gotta keep them out. Dumbasses.)

Nothing seemed designed to keep the civilians from leaving, but Fuyuhiko had the sneaking suspicion that if he tried wandering outside that ring of guards, there’d be some uncomfortable questions. He could weasel out on his own, Kazuichi hadn’t been wrong about that, but he doubted they’d be eager to let him leave with someone seriously injured.

Well. He’d worry about that when it became a problem.

Two tents down from Kazuichi, he ducked into the brightness of the one containing Izuru.

A few more people were awake in here, though not in much better shape than the groaning bodies in the cots around Kazuichi. Izuru was near the entrance, propped somewhat upright on a heap of pillows he’d probably Ultimate Debate Team’d them into giving him, a thick pad of gauze secured to his forehead with medical tape. He was talking to someone Fuyuhiko guessed was a nurse (but seriously, they all wear the same damn suits, who even knows), and as the yakuza walked in, Izuru said something that made her press a hand to her mouth with a flattered giggle. She was sitting on the edge of his cot. Her other hand was coyly stroking his fingers.

(God, at least _he’d_ had the decency to spread some despair to the people he interacted with.)

“Are you fuckin’ FLIRTING right now?” Fuyuhiko said loudly, announcing his presence.

The nurse gave a little squeak of what might have been either laughter or surprise, and jumped up. Izuru’s level gaze slid over to Fuyuhiko as she stammered some excuse. And then, to Fuyuhiko’s utter horror and disgust, Izuru reached up and touched her arm with a sincere smile, and said with every indication of warm affection, “It’s alright, Sena. Can you give us a minute?”

“Oh, that’s your friend! Sorry, I’ll just… give you two some space, eh-heh…”

He laughed, actually _laughed_ , as she rushed to the far end of the tent on the pretext of checking on a different sickbed. Fuyuhiko sat down heavily on the spot she’d vacated and stared at Izuru.

“Hey, uh, Izuru. Brother. You… feeling okay?”

As soon as Sena turned away, Izuru’s face went blank again, the smile melting away like fog in the sunlight. “Significantly better than I was an hour ago, yes,” he said, and his voice had a comforting flatness to it that made the tight knot of worry in Fuyuhiko’s stomach loosen. He was taking care not to move his head too much, following Fuyuhiko only with his eyes. “Sena isn’t the first nurse I’ve flirted with today. The majority of the medical personnel here consider me a likable and trustworthy person. I have a very disarming smile.”

“You also have hair like a diner grease trap, so I don’t know why she’s interested.” 

“And yet she gave me her number,” said Izuru, sounding almost smug about it.

Fuyuhiko’s eye slid over to where Sena was fussing over another patient, across a room of entirely too many conscious people. It struck him, suddenly, that he was talking to someone with the mental capacity to do entirely the opposite of what Kazuichi was doing right now, and _blend the fuck in._

“You’re acting,” he hissed, low enough not to be heard by the nearest cots. “Oh thank god. Oh thank _god_ , for a second I assumed you had permanent brain damage.”

“A concussion,” Izuru corrected him. “Nothing serious. Something that, upon further reflection, it shouldn’t be surprising that I would have above average susceptibility to. It would not need to have been a strong blow.”

“Because of your…” Fuyuhiko dragged a finger across his forehead, mimicking Izuru’s scar. “Uh.”

“You can say the word ‘lobotomy,’ Fuyuhiko. I won’t be _offended_ by it. Yes, because of that. I won’t bore us both with the exact science.”

“You really are okay,” Fuyuhiko breathed, sagging in relief. “I’m not alone in this with fucking _Kazuichi Soda_.”

Another brief smile, another laugh indistinguishable from something genuine. He really was a good actor. “How’s your burn?”

Fuyuhiko grimaced and shuffled his position, tried to block his right arm from Izuru’s field of view. He’d been trying to forget about the arm. The arm made him look weak, and he HATED looking weak. “Hey, I know you’re pretending to be concerned because we need them to think you’re the kind of normal fuckin’ guy who would have enough basic human empathy to ask that, but maybe just lay the hell off that one.”

The smile faded slowly, and Izuru’s brow wrinkled, crinkling the medical tape. A ghosting of vague bewilderment over an emotionless non-expression. “Pretending…?” The knot in Fuyuhiko’s gut clenched again.

A moth, grey as ash, made a flickering shadow as it flittered in from the darkness and landed on Izuru’s bedding. Izuru’s eyes followed it distantly for a moment before he emphatically squeezed them shut, focused, reoriented himself.

“Noted. You’re still insisting you feel no pain. I’m sure in some nebulous way, you find that infantile facade comforting.”

Nice to be reminded that despite that gut-wrenching worry, he really did hate Izuru sometimes.

“My reflexes are not at their peak, at the moment, and people would see you stab me,” Izuru added, eyes still closed, a split second before Fuyuhiko’s hand instinctively twitched in the direction of his knife. Gritting his teeth in frustration, Fuyuhiko relaxed his arm again. Izuru’s fake smile this time didn’t have to be so goddamn _smug_.

“Okay,” he said, irritated, covering the jerking motion of his hand by shooing the moth away instead. “So when the hell are you gonna be up and about enough for us to leave?”

“On average, non-strenuous physical activity can be resumed after forty eight hours of bedrest,” Izuru said blandly, sounding as if he were quoting a textbook.

“Oh, great, yeah, two days. We’ve got two days, that’s fine! That’s not a goddamn PROBLEM!”

“Lower your voice. People are staring,” said Izuru, still with his eyes closed.

Fuyuhiko glared around the tent before lowering his voice again and leaning in closer.

“I don’t see forty eight hours happening, to be real fuckin’ honest with you, Izuru.”

Izuru’s shoulders shrugged, unconcerned. “I am not an average person. My body will cope. It was designed to. You’re planning to leave tonight.”

“Yeah well, we got what we came for, everybody’s had some basic medical attention. I’d _love_ to be able to hang around for the healing process, but this is all gonna spiral out of control pretty damn fast,” Fuyuhiko murmured. “I think our deadline here is-“

“-How long Kazuichi can keep his mouth shut,” they said simultaneously.

“Yeah,” said Fuyuhiko. “Yeah, and I don’t have high hopes for that.” A thought occurred to him, and he added, low and threatening: “And if you’ve got another fuckin’ _prediction_ for when that secret’s finally gonna blow open, I would really appreciate hearing that _right now_ instead of five seconds before it screws us over.”

“I’m sure,” said Izuru, distantly.

“I mean that. Do not pull that shit with me again.”

“Hm.” (His eyes are still closed. His eyes have been closed for a while now.)

“Hey, are you… falling asleep? Is it okay for you to be falling asleep?”

“It’s a common misconception that I shouldn’t,” Izuru murmured.

“Yeah, fuck that, I’m asking someone who isn’t concussed.” He shouted across the tent. “HEY! Hey what’s-your-face, the broad in the suit!”

Izuru winced at the noise and muttered: “Sena.”

“Sena? Fucking Sena! Is it okay for him to be falling asleep?!”

From the other end of the tent, Sena made an emphatic shushing motion and nodded her head. Izuru lifted one hand just high enough to wave at her vaguely, the corners of his mouth quirking up in an affectionate smile which made her blush and look away again, the situation smoothed over.

“Fine. Shit, fine, Cassanova.” Fuyuhiko made a sweeping, theatrical motion of dismissal and leaned back to stare up at the white canvas above him, processing a day’s worth of pain and tension and frustration and Being In Charge. “Fine, fuck you, I’ll figure it out myself.”

Izuru said nothing.

The moth fluttered across one of the fluorescents. Smacked itself against the glass a few times with a dull tapping sound, desperate to reach the light.

After a while, Fuyuhiko asked quietly, “Hey, Izuru?”

It took Izuru a few seconds to respond, and even then it was only another dismissive “Hm.” The indifferent, back-of-the-throat sound he made when he’d long since lost interest in the conversation and could probably quote every word back to you later, but was, in every other aspect, essentially ignoring you. Fuyuhiko pushed forward anyway.

“Who’s Hajime Hinata?”

 _Tap, tap, tap,_ went the moth against the glass. Another long silence from Izuru.

Finally: “Should I know the answer to that?”

_Tap, tap, tap._

“I don’t know,” said Fuyuhiko, mulling that over. “Guess not.”

________________

Kazuichi Soda burst into the third medical tent.

The young woman in the Future Foundation suit, standing at the back of the tent, screamed, and Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu whipped his head around and leapt to his feet, disbelieving. “KAZUICHI WHAT THE FUCK??”

“Not so loud,” Izuru murmured faintly from the cot, trying to sink further into his pillows.

“Hey,” panted Kazuichi, pained, his eyes shining far, far too brightly. “So remember how you told me to… uh… try not to open my mouth and make any noises with it?”

Fuyuhiko just stared, the muscles in his face twitching. Kazuichi looked down at himself, at the makeshift crutches he’d hobbled in on, MacGuyver’d together from his disassembled cot. At the bloodied iron monkey wrench in his left hand, the semiautomatic rifle emblazoned with the silver logo of the Future Foundation gripped in his right - awkwardly, because of the ripped out helicopter dashboard slung under his right arm, sparking slightly and trailing wires. The blood drenching his jumpsuit dripped with a pattering rhythm onto the dirt beneath him.

He looked up again just as, with a cascading boom, a helicopter went up in a massive fireball somewhere behind him, turning the night briefly into searing day and catching a row of tents on fire.

Kazuichi grinned proudly, sharp teeth glittering in the flickering orange light, and tossed Fuyuhiko the gun. “I may have accidentally opened my mouth and made some noises with it.”

“I LEFT YOU ALONE FOR TEN MINUTES!!” screamed Fuyuhiko. Behind him, Izuru’s shoulders were shaking very slightly with what Kazuichi could have sworn, if he didn’t know any better, was hysterical laughter. But those were probably just the vibrations from the second explosion.


	3. Chapter 3

Izuru Kamukura was immensely entertained.

This was despite the dull, distracting throbbing at the back of his head, the way the top of his skull seemed to be splitting apart in a sharp line along his forehead and attempting to unscrew itself. Or maybe this was _because_ of it - because it was hard to predict anything when your thoughts scattered like drainflies when you turned your head. He hadn’t seen this coming. And so, as the chaos unfolded, as Fuyuhiko and Kazuichi screamed at each other while the world burned in the background, Izuru found himself… enjoying it?

It was a new sensation. He allowed himself a few precious seconds to bask in it.

“I don’t know why you’re screaming? You were the one whining about how you didn’t bring a gun! I brought you a gun!”

(If I stood up now, I could probably stay upright unaided for about… two minutes? I’m not _sure_ of that, this is _interesting_. Regardless, two point five seconds should be more than adequate; I don’t intend to _stay_ upright.)

“I didn’t want a fuckin’ gun as much as I wanted to _survive the night_ , you _stupid, impulsive-_ ”

“Get down,” said Izuru, calmly. He was already rolling out of the cot as he said it, getting to his feet in one smooth motion and grabbing them both by the backs of their shirts, because neither of them was going to process that and react in time. 

“Wha-“ began Fuyuhiko, but the wind was knocked out of him as the three of them hit the ground, hard, and a spray of bullets peppered the air they’d vacated with a sudden barrage of lead-flavored death.

The shock of impact stabbed Izuru between the eyes, made the world lurch, spun it fast and turned it into a million starbursts of meaningless color and light. He hissed and closed his eyes, pressing his forehead to the ground and willing his thoughts to reassemble themselves. When he opened them, the dials and switches and blinking lights of the helicopter dashboard Kazuichi had dragged in were right in front of him; one of them had grabbed the thing and flipped it upright like a shield. Bullets pinged off of it. Fuyuhiko was on his right, peering intently around it, lying on his stomach and sighting down the rifle.

“Shit! Shit, it’s too bright in here, I’ve got no night vision! They can see us, and I can’t see them! SHIT!!”

“They shot their own people,” Kazuichi squeaked, directly to his left. “They shot up a tent full of people they rescued, _holy crap-_ ”

He was right. Blood spattered the pristine white canvas, where stray bullets had sheared into the rows of cots. Not everyone was dead. Some hadn’t even been hit. The smart ones had rolled off their cots and hit the floor like the three of them. The stupid, panicking ones - those still able to move, after their bomb - were scrambling to their feet, screaming and running for the exit. Inevitably, they too hit the ground, in sprays of blood and dull thumps of dead weight. Sena was curled up, cowering, in the far corner, her hands pressed to a rapidly bleeding bullet wound in her side. (Nonfatal, if she keeps still and receives medical attention after this is over. She’s likely received training for a situation like this, she’ll stay calm. Unimportant.)

“Of course they did,” said Izuru, dispassionately, and Fuyuhiko laughed.

“Are you kidding me? The Future Foundation would kill _anyone_ in the crossfire, if it meant putting a bullet through even one Remnant of Despair. And here they’ve got three of us. Hell, they could shoot up the whole camp and still be saints for it.”

“Ethical debate aside, it confirms they’ve realized who we are,” said Izuru. “You understand what happened here. Even if by some miracle not a single person saw him limp in here covered in blood, even if her scream didn’t give us away-” He gestured backwards casually towards Sena. “The two of you screaming at each other certainly did.”

“Okay, yes, got that,” Fuyuhiko growled. “Thanks, Izuru, your input is helpful as always. How many shooters?”

The calculation ran, and it _hurt_ , filled his vision with stars again. (The majority of their armed guards will have run towards the helicopters when the explosions started. I don’t know their initial numbers or starting positions, but if everyone’s carrying the same gun as Fuyuhiko, then the number of bullets per second would indicate…)

“Six. I… think six.”

“You’re not _sure?_ ”

(Follow the angles of the bullets, locate the distance and direction of each shooter… I can’t. It’s all spinning, I can’t pin it down.) Fuyuhiko’s hand was a firm pressure on his shoulder.

“Stay with me, brother.”

“Hey,” Kazuichi whined, “How come he gets genuine concern, and all I got was ‘it’d be funny if his leg fell off’?”

“Because he’s orders of magnitude more important than you are,” Fuyuhiko snapped, at the same time as Izuru said, “Because the fear of abandonment is your greatest motivator and we needed to keep you from panicking.”

“You _guys_.” Kazuichi’s face split into a wide, warm grin. A bullet clipped the metal leg of the cot next to him in a shower of sparks. “That’s actually, like… sweet, kind of. I didn’t know you were being all reverse psychology about it.”

“I will fuckin’ _shoot you with this gun_ , Kazuichi.”

“Hey, you wanna talk orders of magnitude? Check this out and then tell me how unimportant I am,” Kazuichi said, still grinning, and he reached up and rapid-fire flipped a series of switches on the helicopter panel they were hiding behind.

(The lights on it are blinking,) Izuru realized, belatedly, and his eyes found the wires still trailing off from the back of the hunk of metal and circuitry, out into the darkness. (Only with a concussion could I have missed that. It still has power. It’s still connected to something, which means-)

The choppy roar of a rapidly approaching propeller blade rent the air, and the wires went taut for a split second before jerking the entire rig out through the open doorway and leaving them exposed. Kazuichi’s whoop of triumph joined a few dozen screams as their makeshift cover was replaced by three tons of Future Foundation helicopter crashing down directly in front of the tent, at an angle that made its rotor blade catch against the asphalt with a horrible screech. The entire thing flipped, bounced, rolled in a crumpling heap of twisted metal before scraping to a slow stop in the middle of the street.

There was a moment of silence. The gunfire had ceased.

“Awesome,” said Kazuichi.

What was left of the helicopter exploded.

Flat on their stomachs, the worst of the flaming shrapnel passed over their heads; ripped through the canvas above and behind them and set their own tent ablaze. With a loud _pop_ , the fluorescents went out, leaving them in a flickering darkness backlit by fire.

Fuyuhiko was on his feet, grabbing Kazuichi by the collar and dragging him upright. He kneed Kazuichi’s cast, eliciting a sharp squeal of pain.

“You goddamn bomb obsessed fucking punk haired piece of useless human garbage! You braindead pyromaniac toddler, you fucking tool!!”

“Well,” Kazuichi panted, smiling a little manicly at him. “Tools are kind of my thing.”

“If you had control of a helicopter, we could have ESCAPED ON THE GODDAMN FUCKING HELICOPTER!!”

“Control is maybe a strong word in this situation,” Kazuichi admitted, eyeing the smoldering wreck outside. “And I get airsick, so…”

It was the final straw, in a day full of straws the size of smashed-up helicopters. The expression on Fuyuhiko’s face seemed to indicate that something vitally important in the back of his brain had finally snapped off and gotten jammed in the gears. One corner of his mouth twitched upwards, toothily, into what could technically be defined as a smile, and Izuru could see the despair rushing upwards through him, the desperation and anxiety flooding his brain with dopamine and turning the pain into pleasure.

(If he goes under now, our odds of survival drop sharply.) Izuru blinked, as that line of pain stabbed through his head again and approximately 50% of him thought (which would be interesting) while the other 50% provided: (which I should probably be preventing). That sense of uncertainty, of second-guessing his own decisions, sped his heart slightly - made the muscles of his diaphragm tense and set off a fluttering sensation in his stomach, a rush of nervous energy. (That’s… odd.)

“We need to move,” he said, still on the floor. “ _Fuyuhiko._ ” The tent blazed around them. Smoke was filling the baking air, hiding the back of the tent in a white haze. From outside, there were shouts, running feet.

“He gets. Fuckin’. AIRSICK!”

“I got them off our back, man! They were shooting at us and I got them off our _don’t point that at me why are you pointing that at me??_ ”

“ _Fuyuhiko_ , you are in _charge!_ ” Izuru shouted, and something clicked back into place in Fuyuhiko’s head. Ultimate Yakuza took over. Fuyuhiko’s hand sprang open, sending Kazuichi sprawling to the ground. He shook his head vigorously, cleared it of something dark and smothering, and the gun swung back down to hang slack at his side. For the first time, he seemed to see the fire consuming the canvas all around them, feel the heat against his skin, the sweat running down his face and leaving streaks in the thin coating of soot and dirt and plaster dust covering them all.

“R-right. Yeah. Getting everybody the hell out of here. Okay.” 

He gripped Kazuichi, by the forearm this time, and pulled him roughly to his feet. There was an angry moment in which Kazuichi balanced precariously on one leg and refused to release his vicegrip on Fuyuhiko’s arm. “Oh. Right.” Fuyuhiko gathered up the jury-rigged crutches and offered them sourly. “Just. Keep up.”

Kazuichi yanked them from his hands. “Jerk.”

While Kazuichi arranged himself awkwardly on the crutches, muttering some sullen protest, Fuyuhiko bent to help Izuru up. “Stay with me, brother,” Izuru told him quietly, echoing Fuyuhiko’s own words.

“S… shut up. I have my shit together.” Fuyuhiko’s expression skewed to confusion. “What the hell are you doing with your face?”

(What?) Whatever expression he’d been wearing, Izuru felt it flatten into vacuousness the second Fuyuhiko brought it up. The yakuza shrugged it off and offered his hand.

Behind him, a figure came barreling out of the smoke, thrown into sharp relief by fire and brandishing a surgical scalpel in the hand not clinging with a desperate pressure to her bleeding side.

(I really can’t predict anything today,) Izuru thought, as the screaming blur that was Sena collided with Fuyuhiko.

It was almost impressive. Had she tried it on anyone but the Ultimate Yakuza she probably could have gotten a stab in, but when the two of them hit the ground it was Sena on the bottom. Fuyuhiko’s knee was on her chest, one hand pinning her wrist to the floor as she twisted the tiny scalpel ineffectively, the other pressing the barrel of the gun to the space just under her jawline.

“Oh, I do _not_ fuckin’ need THIS today.”

Kazuichi leaned over them both with a look of mild amusement. “Oh, wow, that’s ballsy. You all saw that, right? That was ballsy.”

“You’re _Despair_ ,” Sena whispered, the word a hiss of contempt. Her eyes flickered to where Izuru was slowly pulling himself up with the help of the nearest cot, and there was something strange in them. Disbelief. Betrayal.

It took Izuru a moment of headache and vertigo and dancing lights again (standing up had been a bad idea; he really needed to just lie down for two days, this entire situation was medically inadvisable in so many ways), before his brain reassembled itself in the upright position and he realized why.

(Ah. I flirted with her. She trusted me. She thought I was… nice.) Sena’s eyes shone, watery, in the firelight. “You were hurt. You were _hurt_ and we _helped_ you! You’re Despair-”

“No SHIT?” Fuyuhiko said with a humorless bark of laughter, and Sena flinched. “What the _fuck_ gave it away??”

“Guys,” said Kazuichi.

“If you keep moving around like that, you’ll bleed out,” Izuru told her coldly, ignoring him.

“Nah, she seems healthy as a horse,” said Fuyuhiko, dragging the nurse to her feet along with him, the gun still jammed into the crook of her neck. He yanked the scalpel from her fingers and tossed it somewhere behind him. “Seems fuckin’ overflowing with energy, considering she was the only person in the whole goddamn tent brave enough to try and stop us.” From the look in Sena’s eyes, she did not take the compliment well, coming from him.

“Guys, I think they finally pulled themselves back together after the helicopter thing. There’s, uh, there’s some people coming this way, and they have guns and they don’t look, y’know, _happy_ with us, exactly,” said Kazuichi, nervously, from the doorway.

“You know what? I think what we’ve got here is a volunteer for meat shield duty. You wanna be a fuckin’ hostage, Sayo?”

“Sena,” Izuru corrected automatically.

“Izuru, I do not give a _goddamn shit._ ”

“Guys! Do we have a plan for the whole, ‘the tent is surrounded and they have guns’ thing, because it would be _super_ if either of you had a plan for that, y’know?”

“Kazuichi, shut up. If they haven’t opened fire yet it’s because they’re not sure if we’re still alive in here,” Fuyuhiko snapped, not looking away from Sena. “They’re working up the guts to check. It’s fuckin’ amateur.”

“I mean… we probably killed most of their professionals with a helicopter.”

“The Future Foundation…” Sena interrupted, nervously, and had to swallow and lick her lips a few times before continuing. Fuyuhiko’s glare bored into her. “The Future Foundation would shoot through me to get to you. You can’t use me as a hostage. They wouldn’t care. When we join, we know that. That… Th-that killing you is the goal. I’m not afraid to die, for that.”

(Blinking too quickly. Hands shaking, not from pain, but from fear. She _is_ afraid to die, but at the same time, she means it. She honestly considers it worthwhile, to die for this cause. Only in the human race can one find such senseless, pointless martyrdom.) Her eyes found him again, and Izuru’s chest tightened further; a strange weight twisted uncomfortably in his gut. (A girl stared up at him with those betrayed eyes, not understanding.)

“Alright, fuck it. Thanks for your honesty,” said Fuyuhiko, and pulled the trigger.

Sena screamed as the sudden spray of bullets clipped her left ear. Izuru’s hand had shoved the barrel of the gun aside at the last millisecond, and Fuyuhiko’s head jerked up to look at him in alarm. “What-”

“If it makes even one of them hesitate, for even a tenth of a second, she’s an effective meat shield,” Izuru said, his own voice sounding strangely out of breath in his ears. “Don’t waste resources.”

There was a moment of roaring white noise from the fire. Fuyuhiko was staring at him. Was anything he’d just said factually accurate? Had he analyzed _anything_ before turning the gun aside? His head was pounding. (A girl, staring. Blood on the tile.)

“Okay, well, you fired the gun, so they definitely know we’re alive in here now,” came Kazuichi’s frantic voice.

“Izuru,” said Fuyuhiko slowly. “Not to question the decision making capacity of your six million dollar brain, but you look… really out of it, right now.”

“Nausea,” he responded, faintly, slowly letting go of the gun. Or, whatever it was, it was certainly doing unpleasant things to his stomach. He didn’t have a word for the tightness in his diaphragm, the pressure-but-not-quite pain creeping up his throat, seizing up his muscles and making it hard to breathe… what WAS this? He blinked rapidly, his eyes stinging in the smoke.

Fuyuhiko opened his mouth to respond, worry painted across his face.

 _“Guys!”_ Kazuichi went stumbling backwards between them, tripping over his own crutches in an effort to get away from the doorway. The shapes materializing in out of the darkness in Kazuichi’s wake were indistinct, hidden by smoke, just suits and guns and gas masks.

Fuyuhiko’s reaction was calm, instantaneous, like he’d done this a thousand times before. He wrapped his burned arm around Sena’s shoulders and manhandled her into standing in front of him, the gun pressed to her temple. “Back the FUCK off.”

(To fire into a crowd of strangers you can’t see is fundamentally easier, psychologically, than to fire on a coworker who’s standing right in front of you.) For a heartbeat, they hesitated. Fuyuhiko did not. The gun swung in a wide arc, and bullets ripped through those iconic suits.

“Kazuichi,” Fuyuhiko shouted over the gunfire, and it wasn’t the voice of anger and false bravado that he usually paraded around; even through the growing dizziness and disorientation, Izuru could tell that. It was the voice of a mob boss, giving an order he was absolutely confident in and couldn’t imagine anyone disobeying. It sparkled with Talent, and Kazuichi stood to attention slightly just hearing it. “Izuru’s fading fast. I want you to take charge and get him out of here, yeah? Go out the back. I’ll take these bastards.”

“I’m in charge??” Kazuichi glanced apprehensively at the roiling smoke filling the back of the tent, the rain of ash and bits of burning canvas. Something structural creaked alarmingly. “W-wait, though… the back? I don’t think there’s an exit-”

Fuyuhiko’s thrown bowie knife would have smacked him in the face, had Izuru not reached out and caught it. Even then he fumbled, his timing off, his fingers feeling numb. Kazuichi caught the knife with a yelp as it slipped from his hand.

“It’s a fucking _tent_ , Kazuichi.”

________________

Kazuichi Soda staggered through the rough rip he’d made in the burning canvas, pulling Izuru behind him, and the two of them collapsed onto the asphalt outside in an undignified heap. There was a complicated moment of clutching hands and overbalancing and leaning heavily on one another, and then between the two of them they’d somehow gotten upright again.

He waved the knife as threateningly as he could at the tear they’d just tumbled out of, just in case someone in the Future Foundation had made it past Fuyuhiko. “You all better just… stay away from us! I’ve got a knife! And I definitely know how to use it to stab a person, in close combat, who has a gun!”

Yeah, that sounded good. The trick to any good lie was including a few believable specifics.

Nobody followed them out. After a moment, Kazuichi let the knife drop to his side. “Yeah, that probably scared ‘em off.”

They were in a narrow sort of alley between tents. On either side, the canvas blazed, and Kazuichi caught brief glimpses of flickering shadows out on the street; people running for the medical tents. Gunfire, a lot of it, rent the sweltering air. Izuru was clinging to his shoulder as if it was the only thing keeping him standing. His eyes were unfocused, his breath a little too off-rhythm. He didn’t seem likely to offer up the next course of action.

It finally began to sink in to Kazuichi that he’d been put in charge.

Izuru Kamukura was technically, theoretically, in a certain light if you squinted, Junko’s second, and now that she was dead that sort of, technically, made him the leader of the Remnants of Despair. And if he ever deigned to actually give any orders they would all unquestioningly follow them, obviously. But it was clicking into place for Kazuichi that in a much more solid and immediate way, _he_ was now quite suddenly responsible for _Izuru._

Okay, cool. Take charge. Bolster confidence in the troops, say something leaderly.

“What the crap are we gonna do now??”

(Yeah, the way your voice cracked at the end really sold that, you coward.) Kazuichi cleared his throat roughly and tried again. “Ha-ha, what I mean is, Fuyuhiko wasn’t super clear on what the plan was from here, right? So, do you think we’re supposed to, like, run for it, or do you think we should wait for him, oooor…?”

Izuru did not contribute an opinion. The gunfire continued. Several bullets zipped through the canvas.

“‘Cause, y’know, he said he’d handle it, but it sorta feels like…” Kazuichi scratched the back of his neck awkwardly, a nervous motion. “…Like we’re ditching him?”

Izuru seemed to rouse himself slowly from his thousand yard stare. “He assured me he had his shit together.”

Kazuichi stared moving, slowly, maneuvering himself awkwardly on the crutches and supporting Izuru’s weight. His left hand kept a white-knuckled grip on the bowie knife. “And did he? In your professional opinion, as the guy who always has his shit together.”

A pause from Izuru, and then, “He generally does, when it matters.” When Kazuichi continued worriedly staring back at the tent, he added, “If they’d killed him, they wouldn’t still be shooting at him.”

“If _I_ was in a gunfight with Fuyuhiko, and _I_ got a hit in on him, I would absolutely keep shooting at him. I think bullet wounds just make him angrier.”

“Heh.” It might have been a laugh, or just a heavy, pained breath of air; it was hard to tell. They stumbled unsteadily between the tents.

“You saw his eyes, right?” Kazuichi said quietly, after a moment of staggering progress. “Uh… eye, singular, I guess. When he was screaming about the helicopter, waving a gun at me. He had that _look_ , y’know? You don’t think he’s…?”

He trailed off, not needing to explain. Despair - glorious, addictive despair - was almost impossible to resist when it started to pull you under. Kazuichi of all people knew it made you stupid. You made reckless decisions; threw yourself into losing situations for the thrill of it and didn’t care if you lived or died or how spectacularly, viscerally hurt it got you.

Izuru seemed to read his mind. “That-” And the _that_ here was a sweeping verbal gesture encompassing the gunshots, the screaming, the chaos just beyond their little gap in the row of tents. “-is not how he feeds his despair. The failure, yes, the getting caught, but not the killing. The killing is purely his talent.”

“You’d know,” Kazuichi muttered.

“Also, he’s not you. He knows how to prioritize that.”

“Ok, harsh? My leg’s broken, man, I had to take the edge off. I probably could have gone into shock or something before they doped me up with all these amazing painkillers.”

“I’m not on any painkillers,” said Izuru, in a dull tone of That’s Not An Excuse, Kazuichi that the mechanic chose to ignore.

“Aw, seriously? Future Foundation, what the heck?”

Ultimate Pharmacist seemed to chime in automatically, bored but informative. “There are precious few pain medications you can safely administer to someone with a traumatic brain injury. Everything they had on hand would have killed me.”

Kazuichi gave him a look of heartfelt commiseration. “Izuru, _buddy_.”

They weren’t far now from the edge of camp. The gunfire had grown distant, sporadic. Kazuichi reached the end of the last tent and eyed the short, dark gap between them and cover: the crumbling, graffiti’d buildings of an anarchic and sparsely populated post-Tragedy city. (Not super far. All the perimeter guards are probably running towards the action, right? So this’ll be easy.)

The crutches shuffled, and he took a limping step forward. And all at once, the world seemed to stop. The fire, the shouting, the volleys of gunshots, Kazuichi’s own rapid heartbeat pounding in his ears - it all ran together in a distant, muted roar, so utterly secondary to the quiet click of the pistol being cocked directly behind his head.

“Ah,” said Izuru, unsteadily. “I really, really cannot predict anything today.”

Kazuichi let off a keening whine. The gun was pressed to the back of his head, digging into the fabric of his hat. (No, c’mon man, that’s not _fair_ , we were so _close!_ )

“Drop the knife!!”

He dropped the knife.

“So here’s what’s going to happen,” said a woman’s strained voice, behind him. She sounded breathless, angry, on the verge of hysteria. “You lied to us. You used us. We gave you shelter, we treated your wounds-”

“Y-you can skip the speech,” Kazuichi interjected, his own voice quavering with a sort of nervous laughter. “Uh, one of your nurses gave us this speech literally five minutes ago, y’know, so I’ve heard this speech-”

“SHUT UP!” The gun jabbed at the back of his head. (Despair tried to rise, and got jammed in the whirring clockwork of the Ultimate Mechanic on the way up. He’d fiddled with a lot of guns, in his time. Disassembled, reassembled, repaired, built a few of his own just for the hell of it. The pistol she was holding flickered like a blueprint through his head; how it felt, what it sounded like, what size it must be for her to be standing so close. Not one of their standard issue rifles. Probably something small, a little single-shot thing for self defense. She wasn’t one of their fighters. Didn’t seem to be holding it correctly, likely never killed before. See, Izuru, I can figure this crap out too.)

“You’re going to tell me the names and locations of every single Remnant of Despair, all their plans, all the details, or I’m going to blow your _fucking brains out!!”_ Her voice cracked in a rough half-sob, at the end.

Carefully, shuffling the crutches around, Kazuichi turned to face her. Beamed at her with a rictus grin of filed teeth, a jittery mask of despair. “I’m, uh… Heh. Sorry. I’m actually gonna call that bluff, Cocoa Lady.”

The tiny pistol bumped against his forehead, shaking violently in her unsteady hands. The woman who’d brought them hot chocolate less than an hour ago glared at him through furious tears, eyes already swimming with the beginnings of something dark and spiraling. Still leaning on Kazuichi’s shoulder, Izuru watched the situation unfold with detached interest. (He wouldn’t let her actually shoot me, right? No, he’s got this. I’m, like, forty five percent sure he’s got this.) Or maybe it was more like delirium. (Crap. Crap, he doesn’t have this.)

“C’mon,” said Kazuichi, uncertainly. “You seem like a nice person. You and I are cool, right? You wouldn’t rescue a guy from a bombed-out building, feed him cocoa, and then blow his brains out. Not you. You’re one of the good guys.”

“I knew,” she rasped. “I knew something was wrong with all of you. I should have said something. I should have… I s-should have… so many people are _dead_ …”

Kazuichi nudged Izuru surreptitiously and started backing up, away from the trembling pistol. “If it makes you feel any better, it was really good cocoa.”

Her index finger slipped, shakily, on the trigger. (Izuru please have this _Izuru I swear you better not be too concussed to have this_ )

“Why the FUCK are you two STILL HERE??” said Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu, with impeccable timing.

Kazuichi’s muscles turned briefly to water as Cocoa Lady screamed, and whipped around, and fired. The bullet spectacularly missed Fuyuhiko, standing coated in soot and sweat and blood in the flame-bright mouth of the canvas alleyway. Sena, still being steered roughly in front of him and sporting a few dozen burns and scrapes and gunshot grazes, took it directly between the eyes.

Her collapse was slow. A gentle folding inward into a pile at his feet.

“See now, that was a death you could have prevented,” said Fuyuhiko.

Something in Cocoa Lady also folded inwards. She kept screaming, squeezing the trigger again and again and again and again: an endless series of meaningless clicks from a gun with only one shot. The screaming turned slowly to a sobbing, freakish laughter. Despair - glorious, addictive, _infectious_ despair - was almost impossible to resist when it started to pull you under.

Fuyuhiko stepped calmly over Sena’s body and walked past her. He reached over, almost casually, and pulled the pistol from her feeble grip as he passed; tossed it aside and replaced it with the semiautomatic rifle. Behind him, identical in their Future Foundation suits, pursuers cleared the mouth of the alley. What little ammo the rifle had left tore through them in a staccato counterpoint to her shrieking.

“Now who can’t play the long game?” Fuyuhiko muttered smugly as he swung his good arm under Izuru’s and took his weight from Kazuichi. He began walking, half-dragging them both toward that line of buildings just beyond the edge of camp. “NOW who never looks at the big picture, huh, bastard?”

Izuru didn’t answer him. His eyes stared through Sena’s crumpled body as if watching something far away, in another place and another time.

“Hey, uh, he’s really not doing great,” said Kazuichi, tentatively.

“And whose fuckin’ fault is THAT? If somebody hadn’t gotten _antsy_ and blown up two helicopters-”

“Three? Three helicopters,” said Kazuichi, not wanting to be shortchanged on his accomplishments.

“- _three_ helicopters, he’d be lying the hell down right now, and we coulda walked out of here at our leisure, nobody the wiser. You have both let me down indescribably today.”

“It all worked out, though,” said Kazuichi, as behind them the screaming woman was finally tackled to the ground and the gun wrenched from her hands. It had been enough of a distraction. The three of them were gone; dissolved into the darkness of a chaotic city their empire of despair had birthed, embraced by the shadows of its buildings as if it were welcoming them home. “I mean, as far as the Future Foundation knows, we did all that on purpose. Infiltrated them and blew their stuff up and killed all their guys. I bet it made us look pretty sweet, y’know?”

“Give me my goddamn phone, Kazuichi.”

He handed over the hastily repaired burner phone in silence, sensing that it was probably time to shut up before he got punched again. Fuyuhiko grabbed it tersely.

“And yeah,” the yakuza admitted, after a moment. “It did make us look fuckin’ cool as shit.”

Kazuichi grinned widely.

“Blood on the tile,” Izuru mouthed, apropos of nothing. Kazuichi reached over and patted him gingerly on the back.

“Asphalt, man. It was mostly asphalt.”

________________

Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu made a phone call.

Between ruined and sparsely populated buildings, a senseless pattern of looted and untouched, lived in and abandoned, beneath twisted streetlights with no power, he squatted on a crumbling curb and dialed Peko Pekoyama. Beside him, Kazuichi fidgeted. A listless Izuru Kamukura slumped with his head resting on Kazuichi’s shoulder, his long hair a burnt-smelling, blood-matted waterfall of soot and grease and ash and bits of rubble splayed down the mechanic’s back. His eyes were glassy, half asleep. (God am I glad he didn’t come with a you break it, you buy it deal,) came the distant thought, followed belatedly by: (Also, GOD I hope we didn’t break him. Forty eight hours, he said. You need forty eight hours before you’re even supposed to get out of bed, with a concussion, and then we dragged him through all THIS.)

He lifted the phone to his ear. Peko picked up on the first ring, but he wasn’t sure what it was she said. The second her voice sounded tinnily on the other end of the line, a dam finally burst inside Fuyuhiko’s head. Despair pulled at him. And what the hell, he was so very done with prioritizing the big picture.

He stopped fighting it. There was a wonderful ecstasy to just not giving a shit.


	4. Chapter 4

Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu gradually became aware of his surroundings.

_“-Yamanashi prefecture still reeling from last night’s terrorist attack, the bombing of an office building in downtown-”_

He was in a moving vehicle, the gentle, vibrating hum of the road beneath him and the back of his shirt stuck with sweat to the leather of a steeply reclined passenger seat. There was something cool and damp clinging wetly to his forehead; something similar wrapped around the white hot sleeve of pain that was his right arm, making a damp spot at his side. The air conditioning had been cranked all the way up, turning water and perspiration alike blessedly icy against his blistered skin. A car radio buzzed quietly, a newscaster’s voice, the signal poor and static-y.

_“-The Future Foundation has yet to release a statement on whether the attack was the work of the Remnants of Despair themselves, but rumors continue to fly, despite no group yet laying claim to the-”_

The voice became incomprehensible. Popped, flanged, fuzzed out into static. After a minute of buzzing, a second voice began speaking, loud and clear.

_“Oooh! Oh! Dibs! Double dibs! Triple dipped dibs! If nobody’s claimed that yet, Ibuki tooootally calls dibs! Yeppers, that one was all us, whatever the heck it was! Ibuki Mioda in the Morning here, loyal listeners of the despaircalypse, to remind anybody out there who still has electricity that we still own the airwaves and there’s nothing you can do about it!”_

About thirty seconds of an erratic electric guitar solo shrilled wildly, far too close to the microphone.

_“Woo-hoo! Ibuki is FIRED UP for day six of our big sweepstakes: Where Is Ibuki Broadcasting From?? Come find the radio station Ibuki is barricaded inside of and claim your prize, which is… um… Hah! I guess the prize is Ibuki! Reminder to the Future Foundation - the game ends when we run out of hostages! How spifftacularly exciting! That’s a word Ibuki just made up! Let’s take a caller!”_

_“W-why… why are you doing this? Why did you kill my family??”_

_“Oooooooh, sorry, but we’re not taking song requests until later in the show! And while Ibuki loves all her marvelous tracks, Why Did You Kill My Family is, like, toooootally overplayed these days, you dig? No idea why everybody keeps requesting that one. I guess that’s the power of a one hit wonder for you, folks!”_

_WhaaaaAAAAAAAOOOWN_ went the electric guitar, an echoing chord.

Fuyuhiko cracked his eye open and was blinded momentarily by bright midmorning light. Squinting, he recognized the car. One of the sleek black automobiles favored by the Kuzuryu Clan: tinted, bulletproof windows and black leather interior. A suburb slid unhurriedly by outside; dead grass and cracked windows and crude graffiti scrolling past under a sunrise streaked spectacularly with red. The voice on the radio babbled on, chipper.

Scrubbing an arm across his brow, he dislodged what turned out to be a sopping wet scrap of his ruined jacket. So, that torn up, soot-stained shred of pinstriped cloth around his burnt arm was probably the rest of it. Teeth gritted, he peeled it back just enough to see raw, blistered skin.

“I thought it might help with the pain,” said a taut, careful voice at his side. “You seem worse off than you look.”

“Peko?” When he turned his head, Peko Pekoyama was seated stiffly in the driver’s seat, her fingers tight and tense as they gripped the wheel and her mouth a thin line of reticence. She did not look at him. “It’s not that bad,” he began, defensive, and then admitted: “Fuck it, I got nothing to prove to you. It’s exactly as bad as it looks, it’s just worse off than I’m _acting_.”

“It usually is,” she answered wearily. “I am sorry if I interfered with your despair.”

He pressed a palm to his eye, leaned his head back and exhaled roughly. The massive, fantastic hit of despair that had been last night’s cascade of failures had long since faded to a dull, dwindling buzz at the back of his brain, leaving a hollow, miserable aching in its wake: all the suffering and none of the high. “I’m pretty fuckin’ despaired out today, honestly.”

_“In today’s news: Do you have family in Tokyo? Then absolutely awesome news for yous! Ibuki once saw QUITE POSSIBLY THE BEST DOG in Tokyo! The tiniest dog! That dogs could even be ALLOWED to be this tiny is totally blowing Ibuki’s mind, in, like, the MAJORIST way!! Ibuki’s mind was so blown, she almost forgot the surrounding city was on fire! Ah, also, in today’s news: Tokyo is on fire, so your family in Tokyo is probably dead.”_

Fuyuhiko twisted around just long enough to check the backseat, while Ibuki’s voice prattled on enthusiastically in the background. ( _“Today’s weather: mostly overcast, with chances of acid rain later because we have killed the atmosphere and repeatedly humped its corpse!”_ ) Barely recognizable through a layer of soot and dust and grime and bloodsplatter, Izuru and Kazuichi were splayed in a haphazard pile in the backseat, both still breathing, both fast asleep.

(Great. Counting this one as a win.) He fell back lethargically into his own seat, staring up at the roof of the car for a moment, getting his bearings. Peko drummed her fingers restlessly on the steering wheel.

“Guess you found us alright,” Fuyuhiko said to the ceiling.

“It was… not difficult,” she said, choosing her words carefully.

“Yeah, on account of we left a trail of destruction in our wake that could probably be seen from space.”

“Should I have invloved Mikan?” she asked, as he picked at the suit again.

“Thought about it, back when it was our only option, but everybody’s pretty much patched up, now. Don’t think it’s a good idea to subject ourselves to her if nobody’s actively fuckin’ dying. You made the right call.”

_“But who are we kidding, nobody’s here for news! Crank that volume all the way up, superfans, so your brains can baste in some hot subliminal juices, ‘cause Ibuki’s about to blow your speakers out with her newest hit single: I’m Too Creative For My Nine To Five Job So I Murdered My Employer With An Office Stapler!!!!”_

Fuyuhiko leaned over and shut the radio off as the song started. There were certain pain thresholds even the Remnants of Despair couldn’t stomach. The silence hummed loudly between the two of them, tires on the asphalt.

He’d been told, by the others, that Peko didn’t emote much. His general response had always been something along the lines of: “what the hell, she emotes all over the fuckin’ place, her heart is on her goddamn sleeve.” People just didn’t pay attention. Right now, she was radiating a silent, upset displeasure; a thousand unspoken words she was forcing herself not to say.

“You got something to say about last night’s events, you can say it,” he muttered. Peko remained silent. “I get it, you know? You disapprove. Think I should have brought you, or at least told you where I was going, ‘cause you can’t protect me if you have no fuckin’ clue where I am. That about accurate? That what’s going on in Peko Central right now?”

“Peko… Central has no opinion on the topic,” she answered, at last.

“Yeah, Peko Central’s spouting bullshit.”

Peko’s mouth skewed into a small frown. “The Young Master’s tool does not question his actions.”

“Hey, I said I’m all despaired out. Don’t play the tool game with me.” Fuyuhiko glared at her intensely. “You need me to fuckin’ order you? I said it’s fine. God.”

“The Young Master’s tool does _not_ question his actions,” Peko repeated, dully.

Fuyuhiko stared at her for a moment, her face drawn and pale, her eyes not meeting his, her hands tightly gripping the wheel. Something unpleasant clicked into place. “Shit. The phonecall. What’d I say last night?”

“I believe…” Peko considered, “The last thing the Young Master said before passing out was: ‘would you two put on your goddamn fucking seatbelts, we’re not animals.’”

“You know what I meant. What’d I say to _you_ last night?”

A long pause. “Nothing the Young Master has not said before,” she answered, finally. “You don’t remember?”

He laughed bitterly. “I went under pretty damn hard, the second we got outta that camp. It’s all kind of a blur. I can _guess_ , though. ‘Get that _concerned tone of voice_ outta here, Peko, I don’t need sympathy from my goddamn PROPERTY. The fuck told you YOU get an opinion? Get in the car, pick us the FUCK up, and keep your fuckin’ mouth shut about it.’ Then I probably… shit, I dunno, threatened to cut something off. That sounds like me.” Peko’s hand rose to her face, hid her expression from view. “What?”

“You… did a little voice,” she mumbled, from behind her hand.

“It’s… I’m fuckin’ quoting myself, deep in the throes of despair, on the phone, in the past. It’s to fuckin’ differentiate!”

“You still had the same voice, on the phone, in the past. You didn’t have a cartoony little voice.”

“Yeah well, you can shut the fuck up with your _judgmental attitude_. Didn’t ask for your damn opinion.”

“You were literally just asking for my opinion, Young Master.”

She was definitely smiling, behind that hand. Early morning sunlight played across her skin, through her hair, made a peaceful, pleasant halo of light against the leather behind her head. He felt himself match her smile. Felt something bright and fleeting well up in him as their emotions resonated - her relief, her affection, her protectiveness… ( _No._ No, fuck, _no!!_ Not this, not _this!!_ Stamp it down, kill it, _kill it!!_ )

A desperate, grasping impulse shot through him. He gripped his arm tightly, squeezed the burnt skin though his makeshift bandages until the pain made his vision go white around the edges. Opened his mouth and poison poured forth and dragged the world back screaming into ugly, brutal unbalance. “Did I fuckin’ _stutter_ when I said _shut the fuck up_ , Peko? What kind of _useless-ass tool_ can’t even follow basic orders?”

Peko tensed again. Placed her hand slowly back onto the steering wheel. Her face was carefully blank, and it choked back the brightness and left a thick, tar-like despondency sitting heavy in Fuyuhiko’s stomach. “Fuck,” he muttered, and pulled his legs up onto the seat and curled in on himself. (“Sorry,” he wanted to say.) “Miss my goddamn Bowie knife,” he said instead. “It didn’t offer up unsolicited commentary, it just stabbed who I needed stabbed. Wish everything I owned was that useful.”

For a while there was just the gentle droning of the road passing beneath them.

“I am sorry if I interfered with your despair,” Peko said tacitly, a second time.

“No, it’s fuckin’…” Fuyuhiko waved his good arm vaguely, still curled up tightly in his seat. “It’s fine. I’m just… Fuck.” He squeezed his arm again, and heard Peko’s breath hiss sharply, as if she was the one in pain. “Sometimes it sorta creeps up on me. Like…”

Another moment of that humming silence.

“Why the hell are we doing this?” said Fuyuhiko, very quietly.

“Young Master?”

Fuyuhiko shook his head, violently. “I… fuck. I mean. Half this shit, the torture and the killings and the fuckin’ ruling the world… we were born into it, right? It’s horrifying for everybody else, it’s a fuckin’ recipe for pain and suffering, and people like Kazuichi can just fall backwards into it without breaking a sweat. But you and me… this ain’t really all that different from what our lives would’ve been anyway, running the Kuzuryu Clan. It’s harder for us to trip our asses off on despair. Maybe I’m just not getting enough of it.”

(Maybe it’s because I don’t want to admit that my greatest source of despair is also my greatest antidote to it. Maybe it’s because every second I’m not beating down Peko Pekoyama is a second I’m happy to be around her, and that’s a fuckin’ complication I do not need. Maybe it’s because she’s the one person on the planet I actually trust enough to say any of this to. Fuck, I’ll probably have to kill her one of these days.)

Peko, marvelous, reliable Peko, immediately did her job. “If a greater despair is what the Young Master desires, his tool will do anything to provide it. Even if I am used and broken and tossed aside.”

“Heh. You really mean that. You just don't give a shit. How do you feed it, Peko?” Fuyuhiko asked, with only mild curiosity, peeking up at her from his tight little crouch. “You don't care if I call you a tool. I never see you just… indulge in this shit.”

“I generally do not indulge in it,” Peko said. “I am a Remnant of Despair because my Young Master is a Remnant of Despair. If he wishes to break the world, that too is my desire.”

“Peko Central’s spouting some bullshit again,” Fuyuhiko grumbled.

Her eyes flickered to him, swept across his burnt arm, drank in his obvious pain. “My despair is secondary to my Master’s service, but… occasionally, I find ways to feed it.”

He grinned, something dark and sinister and safely familiar, this time. “Hell, if that’s how it is, maybe I oughta get royally fucked up more often. Give you something to be miserable about.”

She looked away quickly. “I… definitely don’t want that. If that is your plan, I may have to go as far as to tie you up to prevent it.”

“Then I’d fuckin’ order you to untie me.”

“Then I would also gag you.”

“See, gagging me to prevent me from giving you an order you _know_ I’m gonna give you is essentially the same as disobeying the order, Peko.”

She mulled that over. “Then I would selfishly ask you not to.”

“Peko Pekoyama, bringing out the big guns today! Hey, know who’s never threatened to tie me to a chair? The fuckin’ Bowie knife.” He uncurled himself and stared back out at the passing suburb. (Never show weakness. You never doubted anything.) “Listen, I shouldn’t have to tell a tool this, but all that shit I just said? Didn’t happen. We never had this conversation.”

“Understood,” said Peko.

From the backseat, she was echoed by a faint, whimpering moan that bit itself off as soon as it began.

Peko’s eyes widened, and panic shot through Fuyuhiko as he spun around awkwardly to wedge himself between driver’s and passenger’s side. Behind them, Kazuichi Soda was sitting up ramrod straight, his face a grey-white, sweaty mask of pain, his eyes goggling and watery and darting between them.

“SHIT!” Fuyuhiko’s good arm shot out and grabbed him by the jumpsuit. “How long have you been awake and what the _fuck_ did you hear?”

“Ow, ow owow ow, c-crap, nothing, man, I d-didn’t hear anything! I swear I just woke up!”

“ _Kazuichi_ , I will fuckin’ _skin you_.” He didn’t have to say much more than that. Kazuichi folded easily under pressure; it never took more than idle threats to get him talking.

“I won’t tell anybody!!” Kazuichi stammered, sheet-white. “I mean! I wouldn’t, if I heard anything! B-but I didn’t! And even if I did, it’s cool, man, lots of people are into it!”

Fuyuhiko blinked, nonplussed. “Into what?”

“Rope play! B-being gagged and tied to chairs by sexy girls! Like, everybody thinks about it, y’know? S-so I won’t tell anybody about you and Peko, but, I think, uh, p-people would get it? Sometimes me ’n Miss Sonia-”

“Oh my _god_ do not give me the details of your sex life,” Fuyuhiko said vehemently, and released him. (He didn’t hear me doubt this. He didn’t hear a goddamn thing.) He relaxed slowly; slumped against the side of the seat, his seatbelt digging awkwardly into one shoulder. “Morning, Kazuichi.”

Kazuichi grinned at him, a sharp-toothed crescent that quickly twisted into a grimace of suffering. “Man, I don’t wanna be awake right now. I’m dying. I’m seriously dyiiiing.”

“You’re not dying, your fuckin’ pain meds are wearing off.”

“You know I get carsick, right? I get really carsick.”

“Not in my vintage Nissan with the custom leather upholstery you don’t, asshole. If you throw up in this car, I will gut you.”

Kazuichi’s eyes focused slowly on the car around him, and brightened with the sudden and distracting joy of everything automotive. “Crap, yeah, it IS a Nissan! Interior’s new, but this has gotta be, what, 1970s? What’d you do to the windows? Oh, hey, and how much of the original engine does this baby have? Can I look?” Fuyuhiko smacked his cast again, lightly. “OW! What??” He looked, wide-eyed, between Peko and Fuyuhiko. “H-hey, did I interrupt something? Were you two having, like, a Moment?”

“Oh my god,” said Fuyuhiko, exasperatedly.

“You don’t have any, uh… aspirin on you, or anything, do you?” Kazuichi asked tentatively. When no painkillers seemed forthcoming, he added, “And where are we going?”

“Depends. Where are we dropping you off?”

“Oh, is guys’ night over?” said Kazuichi, sounding mildly disappointed.

“Izuru blew guys’ night to hell and buried its corpse in flaming shrapnel, so yeah. I think we’re done with guys’ night.”

Kazuichi glanced down at Izuru, curled up stiffly in an uncomfortable attempt to fit all five foot eight inches of himself into one side of a vintage Nissan’s backseat. His head was on Kazuichi’s lap, his chest rising and falling evenly. Kazuichi rubbed his shoulder fondly. “C’mon, man. That’s just how he has fun.” He looked back up at Fuyuhiko, smiling shakily through the pain. “It _was_ fun, y’know? Even though we utterly… e-heh, _bombed_ it.” (An appreciative groan of despair from Fuyuhiko.) “Feels like we never just hang out anymore, since we graduated. Everybody’s spread out across the planet, wrecking it. So it was cool to get together with you guys, even for something stupid that we screwed up. Right?”

“Yeah,” said Fuyuhiko. “Honestly? Yeah. It was a blast.” (A matching, appreciative groan of despair from Kazuichi.) “Seriously, where do you live these days? Still squatting in the Hope’s Peak tunnels?”

“Fuyuhiko, man, I haven’t lived in there since before the mutual killing. I set up the executions and crap and then I was gone. I’ve been working out of an autobody shop down in Shizuoka. Beats me where Izuru’s set up camp, though. He kinda just comes and goes.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not dropping Izuru off anywhere until I’m sure he’s not gonna wander off disoriented and die in a ditch somewhere, so the point is moot. Peko?”

“The closest Kuzuryu Clan safehouse is in Kōfu,” Peko chimed in, on command. 

“No safehouses,” said Fuyuhiko. “Nowhere anyone down the chain of command can get a look at my arm.” He gestured to the ripped up suit wrapped around his right arm. “This right here? This is a goddamn target, Peko. Lotta people don’t like how I’m running the clan. One look at this and everybody in Camp Mutiny is gonna be clawing for the top.”

“They would have to go through me,” Peko said, matter-of-factly.

Fuyuhiko shrugged. “Fuck, nowhere the other Remnants can see it, either.”

“What, seriously?” Kazuichi looked skeptical. “That’s just paranoia. We don’t go after each other.”

“The hell do you know? Sonia may be busy razing Europe, but she’s been chomping at the fuckin’ bit for a vote of no confidence in how I’m handling Asia. Queen Bitch doesn’t need another excuse to tip _that_ precarious little balance of power. And I got no idea whose side the Imposter would throw America’s weight behind, if we devolved into fuckin’… civil war or some shit. I’d say at least I’ve got Izuru, but rule the fuckin’ first in the Remnants of Despair is never count on Izuru Kamukura for anything.”

“Crap,” said Kazuichi, with a low whistle. “Never thought I’d be glad to be unimportant. I didn’t know it was so _complicated_.”

It was incredibly complicated. Without the rallying point that was Junko Enoshima, the delicate equilibrium between fifteen incredibly dangerous, dubiously sane people was a fragile thing, carefully maintained by a trio of the most politically influential of them: Fuyuhiko, Sonia, the Imposter - those with armies to back them up. “You don’t need to know the politics. You sit in a garage and build shit,” said Fuyuhiko, who didn’t feel like explaining it. “Hell, maybe we all just lay low for a few days, lick our wounds. Come up for air when the whole thing fuckin’ blows over and let everybody think we planned it this way.”

He slid back into his seat, watching the suburb scroll by on either side, desolate. “Peko.”

“Young Master?”

He was thinking, his eyes distant. “What’s the place down in Okayama like, these days? The summer home? That still standing, or did somebody burn it down?”

“It’s… fairly isolated,” Peko confirmed. “It probably hasn’t been touched. But we haven’t had house staff to maintain it since before the Tragedy.”

Fuyuhiko waved vaguely at her. “You’re house staff. We’ll make it work. And it’d be safe. Bet you nobody on the planet remembers it’s there.” He leaned back between the seats, grinning. “Hey, Kazuichi. Wanna see the house where Peko and I grew up? Well, the vacation home. We spent summers there.”

“Are you… inviting me over to your actual house?”

“Yeah, why not?”

“Am I about to get your _backstory_? That’s like, deep level friendship, man. That’s soul friend territory.” Kazuichi pumped a fist. “Heck yeah, let’s check it out!”

“It’s also a six hour car trip, Young Master,” said Peko, and Kazuichi went somehow whiter.

“H-hey, actually, no, drop me off anywhere! It’s fine, I’ll walk home. Uh. Limp home.”

“You goddamn _infant_ , Kazuichi,” said Fuyuhiko, still grinning. “You’re in this for the long haul, now. We’re doing a fuckin’ road trip.”

“But…” Kazuichi cast around, panicky, for a good argument. “Izuru-”

“Is supposed to sleep for two days. He can do that in the car. Don’t be a wuss.”

“Noooooo…” Kazuichi moaned, as Peko jerked the wheel sharply and made a sudden U-turn that left skid marks on the asphalt. “I get carsick, I get SO carsick.”

“Just keep it down for six hours. You’ll be fine. Or, we dump you in your autobody shop in Shizuoka. Alone, with a broken leg. Never let it be said I ain’t fuckin’ accommodating.”

From the look on Kazuichi’s face, he was seriously weighing his options.

“We’ll stop somewhere for breakfast. Rob a convenience store. It’ll be fun.” Fuyuhiko, smiling wickedly, cranked the radio back up, and Kazuichi’s protests were drowned out by Ibuki’s screaming death metal.

_“Love this crazy world, love this crazy world! Let’s wreck this crazy world and make it crazier together! Perfect for our love! Ransacked for our love! A perfect crazy broken ugly mirror of our love!!!! YEEEEEEAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!”_

“I’m dying,” Kazuichi lamented. “I’m literally, actually dying.”


	5. Chapter 5

Izuru Kamukura sat down on sun-warm concrete, the edge of a wide circular fountain that trickled musically behind him. All around, the grounds of Hope’s Peak Academy were bathed in what the Ultimate Photographer in him called golden hour light; a soft reddish-orange that gilded the trees, the cobblestone walkways, the great brick-and-glass tower of the old school building. The girl sitting beside him noticed none of it. Her face was buried in a handheld game, her thumbs tapping with an unhurried rhythm at the buttons as music played tinnily from the speakers.

“Hey, Chiaki,” he said, announcing his presence as usual because she’d never notice him otherwise. The girl made a small noise of acknowledgement without looking up. He fished around in the pocket of his school uniform for a moment before producing a packet of snacks from the reserve building’s cafeteria. The main campus’s vending machines could probably do better than stale, low-sodium sunflower seeds - not that he’d ever set foot past the gate to see for himself - but Chiaki still reached over and snatched them up appreciatively.

“Mm, thanks. I ended up gaming my way straight through lunch again. I was stuck on a hard boss.”

“I figured,” he said with an affectionate smile, because that was usually the story. “What game?”

“ _Mother_ ,” she said with her mouth full, having somehow managed to open the package one-handed without looking up from her Game Girl. “You’ve heard of it, right?”

“I think I played the sequel?”

“Well, everybody’s played the sequel,” said Chiaki, dismissively. “First one’s a total retro classic. That’s not what I’m playing now, though.” Warm, golden sunlight glinted off the screen as she tilted it so he could see, and Izuru caught a brief flash of his own reflection: short brown hair and hazel eyes. “Dating sim.”

“Hah, really? You hate dating sims.”

“I don’t _hate_ dating sims,” said Chiaki, in a calmly lecturing tone. “I’m just _bad_ at dating sims. There aren’t any games I hate, I think.” She frowned at the screen. “I thought I was doing okay at this one, but downloading the DLC totally corrupted my save file. All the social links are messed up, now.”

“Sorry. I don’t think I can fix that one with sunflower seeds.”

She tipped her head to the side and smiled the most beautiful little smile in the world. “That’s okay. Games are even fun when they’re so broken they’re pretty much unplayable. I even played through _Atari E.T._ once, you know?”

“Chikai, that game is _objectively_ unplayable.”

“Have you ever tried? You can’t judge a game just based on reviews and word of mouth. I think… it’s better to experience things for yourself and form your own opinions. Even broken games usually have something worth-”

She was incorrect. Something stuttered. There was a line he was supposed to say here, but he couldn’t remember it, and the rhythm of the scene staggered, snapped.

“It’s not my opinion. I do mean objectively,” he insisted again, as something surfaced at the back of his brain and provided the relevant data. The Ultimate Gamer, maybe, or the Economist or Historian. “ _E.T._ was a major contributor to 1983’s Atari Shock. It wasn’t just critically panned; it nearly killed the industry.”

The last sliver of sun slipped just below the treeline, and blueish shadows crept up the fountain. Chiaki looked up at him at last, her hands growing still, a little frown etched across her face. It was a calculating expression; one that weighed and measured him and turned every last detail of him over in her mind. He shifted uncomfortably, ran a hand through his trailing hair and tucked a long strand of it behind his ear. “What?”

“That’s not true,” she said, slowly, lining up her words carefully before speaking them. “It wasn’t the game’s fault. It was… the whole industry behind it, I think. The game was just… a byproduct of problems the game industry already had.”

“That game’s very creation, its existence, led to a market crash that bankrupted-”

He went silent as Chiaki abruptly set her Game Girl down on the fountain’s edge with a small, plasticy clack, a little too hard.

“I still like it,” she said intensely, puffing out her cheeks. “Even if it did something terrible. _It’s still a good game._ ”

“You’re too emotionally invested in it to view it impartially.”

“Good! Somebody should be!” For a moment she was bristling fiercely, vibrating with some intense emotion, her hands clasped into fists at her chest. But then Chiaki slowly let her shoulders fall. Exhaled in a long, resigned sigh, and picked up her game again. The music echoed a little glitchily across the darkening, empty courtyard.

“Hey. What’s your name?”

Everyone kept asking him that, recently. “Izuru Kamukura.”

Chiaki’s frown deepened, a little crease appearing between her eyebrows. “I keep thinking we’re about to hit some unlockable content, and then the cutscene doesn’t trigger. The whole save file’s totally corrupted.” She looked back to her Game Girl with another sigh, seeming disappointed. “I think… I’m using the wrong character.”

“Hm.” Izuru looked away from her, out across meticulously groomed lawns, trees, topiaries, all hidden now in shadow. Whatever trouble Chiaki was having with her dating sim, he suddenly found it difficult to care. There was no real satisfaction in having won the argument. In the end, he had been right, and she had been wrong; it was simple fact. The dull white static of disinterest filled his head.

Admittedly, the girl had been a private obsession of his for a time. A puzzle he’d thought might be interesting to solve. But no matter how deeply he’d delved into the life and times of Chiaki Nanami, class rep of 77-B, she’d stubbornly persisted in being exactly as boring and unremarkable as she looked. A quiet, preoccupied, socially oblivious girl utterly absorbed in her own talent - an unmarketable, unemployable talent, at that - one of the sparse few at Hope’s Peak without a bright future ahead of her after graduation. Unarguably an Ultimate, but a waste of the school’s funding to have scouted.

Not that it mattered. Both she and the school had been dead for years. 

There was a faint sloshing sound. Behind him, something rose from the inky black water. An arm - it’s long, red-lacquered nails making it more claw than hand - wove itself with sudden, snakelike fluidity through his long hair, grasped a snarled handful of it, and yanked. Chiaki did not so much as look up as Izuru’s head snapped backwards, and he was dragged unceremoniously by the hair into the fountain.

He hit the black, churning water with a mighty splash and came up coughing, harsh laughter ringing in his ears. “Was that necessary?”

 _She_ surfaced in front of him. Rising from black depths, crawling over where his legs were tangled together under the water until she straddled his prone body: a sopping wet mess of strawberry blonde pigtails and clinging black blouse and impossibly immaculate makeup. Her lips (Glossy. Cherry flavored, he could smell it.) twisted into a delighted grin, outlined in cerise by a toxic red sky. The courtyard behind her was treeless, a pockmarked battlefield of craters and charred ground. “Izzy, honey, of course it wasn’t _necessary_. I just wanted to make an appropriately symbolic entrance. You can’t fault a model a little pageantry.”

“Junko,” he said flatly, a dull acknowledgement of her existence.

“I-zu-ru.” Junko Enoshima, the Ultimate Despair, tilted her head back and forth, pigtails springing cheerily, the image of a ditzy schoolgirl. Distant machine-gunfire echoed across the battlescarred wasteland from the base of the old school building, punctuating each syllable of his name. She draped her arms languidly across his shoulders, tilting her head coyly to smile with narrow eyes in Chiaki’s direction. “Having a wet dream, sweetie? Your subconscious is _garbage_ if your deepest, most carnal desires feature _her_.”

“My deepest, most carnal desires were surgically removed,” Izuru reminded her, coldly. “I don’t have those kinds of dreams.”

“Well, not with that attitude.” Junko made a face. “What are you even doing here, rummaging through crusty-ass old memories of LEETfreak?” Still seated on the fountain’s edge, face buried in her game, Chiaki made a quiet little huff of disapproval. Possibly directed at them, or possibly just in response to something in her dating sim. Junko seemed to take it as the former. “Oh, tag out, switch-tits. You had your chance at his joystick.”

Izuru slid his gaze blankly over to Chiaki. (A memory?) Eidetic memory kicked in, shuffled through his life thus far and failed to find the fountain glowing in that quiet, golden light. Just a jumble of people and images dredged up by stress and slapped together into a scene, then, the way most dreams were. He answered her question anyway. “I’m dreaming. …Lucid dreaming, now, I suppose.”

He stood up, dragging Junko with him by the arms still wrapped around his shoulders, and she wiggled her legs playfully through the water as she was lifted off the ground by the height difference. There was no logical reason to remain soaking wet, so he wasn’t. There was also no logical reason to extend the courtesy to her, so Junko continued to drip. Her voice, sickly sweet, was also dripping. “Ooooh, that basically makes me the girl of your dreams, riiiight~? Izzykins, I’m like, totes flattered.”

“Get off of me.”

“If you don’t want to talk to me, make me spontaneously combust or something. It’s your dream.” She seemed utterly unperturbed by the concept. “Or just wake up, utterly erasing the miserable existence of this pitiful, transient thing you have in your hubris created. Hell if I care.”

“I’m injured; my body needs the rest. Why are you here?”

Her eyes sparkled. “Maybe because I’m the most important woman in the world to you?”

She was right, though not for the reasons she was implying. The smoldering coals of something as close as his desensitized brain could get to anger still simmered dully at the thought of her. Not because she had used him as the catalyst to break society - he honestly did not care about her broken world - but because she’d promised him that this new, ravaged hellscape would be _interesting_ , and had spectacularly failed to deliver.

“Get off of me,” he repeated.

“Methinks the boy art tetchy, today.” She slid down him entirely too slowly and seductively, and settled for toying with a lock of his hair, weaving it idly through her fingers. Eyes downcast, focused on her hands, her face flickered through emotions in rapid succession and selected one as if out of a catalogue, becoming something elegant, didactic. A teacher straight out of a manga. “A theory, if you will. Izuru Kamukura and his Ultimate… Actor? Imposter? Fuck it, Creepy Stalker People Watcher, has constructed himself an absolute _perfect_ copy of the dearly departed Junko Enoshima, because his tragically repressed subconscious is banging impotently upon some mental block and screaming into the unfeeling void: _oh dear god please notice me, senpai._ ”

“Appropriate that it would manifest as you, then.”

“Junko Enoshima the hella clingy? Guilty as charged. Omigod, I _love_ our flirty banter. Do you love our banter? I love our banter.” She wrapped the hair she’d been playing with around her shoulders like a shawl and leaned into him, splashing through the fountain as she did so and deliberately getting him wet again. “But essentially, hot stuff, I’m you and you’re basically just having this conversation with yourself.” A contemptuous gesture over her shoulder towards Chiaki Nanami, as an afterthought. “Oh, and I guess so’s Sonic the Pincushion over there, so unpack that little nugget of Freudian squick.”

“It’s still not a wet dream, Junko.”

“Speak for yourself, I’m, like, fucking soaked?”

With a long sigh, he concentrated and rearranged the universe to her liking. (A perfect descriptor of their relationship, really.) The fountain, the scoured battle zone of a school courtyard, it all melted away into a windowless maze of dim, sterile white hallways. The tunnels under Hope’s Peak Academy: the scene of his creation and her grand killing game executions. Junko, bone-dry, laughed gleefully and twirled away from him, his hair trailing sleek and silkily through her fingers until she’d reached the full length of it, a good five feet away.

(Some part of him noted that it had been years since his hair had been so clean. Then again, these tunnels too were probably no longer as pristine as he was imagining them. At the thought, smears of blood flickered in the corners of his vision. Smashed up execution machines, crumpled cardboard sets abandoned and sagging with mildew and dry rot.)

“Aw, Izzy, you shouldn’t have.” She looked around thoughtfully, again wearing that teacherly expression. “Speaking of Freudian… A tight, dark hallway; the very womb that birthed you… Either dream interpretation is bunk, or somebody wants to bang his mom.”

“You’ve done a lot of talking so far, and said absolutely nothing of value,” was Izuru’s response. A fair warning to the Ultimate Despair that the dim mental white noise of boredom was getting dangerously close to drowning her out. He glanced over his shoulder, to where the distant other end of the hallway opened on a courtyard bathed in warm sunset light. The tricking of a fountain, the plastic clicking of buttons and the quiet music of Chiaki’s Game Girl.

Junko yanked on his hair, forcing him to turn his head and face her. She screwed up her face and stuck her tongue out. “You think she’ll be more interesting? Fuck off. I’m a messenger from your subconscious, remember? The Hermes of your psyche. Follow me, I’m gonna show you something cool.”

She started walking, trailing that handful of hair like a leash, and Izuru found himself following obediently. (Why not, as long as it was interesting.) Behind him, Chiaki glanced up briefly and waved a tiny, distracted goodbye before the hallway twisted and she vanished from sight.

They walked for a while through a long warren of identical, empty tunnels.

“Hey Mr. Lucid Dreamer, you could have slutted me up a bit,” Junko commented, eventually. “I swear I was hotter than this, IRL.”

He didn’t comment.

“I bet Mikan sluts me up in _her_ dreams.”

“You are _rapidly_ losing my interest.”

“Okay, geeze, I’ll get to the point. What’s relevant about _biston betularia_?”

He shuffled through his myriad of talents to the Ultimate Entomologist. “ _Biston betularia_. The peppered moth. Why are you asking?”

“It’s a dream, Einstein. Leading theory is, it’s your brain sorting through whatever cuh-raaaaa-hazy shit went down the day before. So let’s see…” She counted on her manicured fingers, almost mockingly. “Today, Izuru… blew up a building. Trashed a Future Foundation refugee camp. Saw a _cool moth_ , oh my god, I know what we’re dreaming about tonight and _it is bugs_.”

“Dream or not, it’s out of character to ask, if you’re playing the role of Junko,” he said, ignoring her sarcasm.

“We’ve been over this, I’m actually just YOU doing a bit. I could have shown up as Makoto fuckin’ Na-gag-me if that dumb little cherub face would have gotten you _invested_ for once.”

(“I think… I’m using the wrong character,” Chiaki’s voice echoed in his head, and Izuru thought: _Oh._ )

Junko, or whatever part of his psyche was wearing Junko’s face, tugged at his hair again. “You’re concussed, you literally broke your brain. You’re gonna be having some friggin’ bizarre fever dreams, can we, like, move the hell along? Talk dirty to your girl about moths.”

Izuru sighed again and dredged up the information. “The most relevant thing about the peppered moth is its contribution to a famous British scientific study on Darwinain evolution.” This, at least, was interesting, and it kept his focus as they wandered aimlessly through the endless tunnels. “The gray moth evolved to camouflage itself on trees with pale bark, with the population of a black colored variation of the species kept down by predators who could easily spot its lack of camouflage.”

The hallway dead-ended at last: a single door with a frosted glass window, etched with the words “student records”. There was a fresh crack in the glass, barely a day old, a splintering line bisecting the kanji. Junko paused in front of the door. Rocked back and forth on her heels, twirling that long lock of his hair around her fingers as she examined the door thoughtfully. She motioned vaguely at him to keep speaking.

“The peppered moth population shifted towards black with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Air pollution caused the trees to darken, granting the black moths camouflage and making the grey moths stand out. Essentially, natural selection dictated that black moths were more likely to survive, and _biston betularia_ evolved accordingly, making black moths the genetic norm. A second, later study solidified the findings of the first. A species must adapt to survive.” He went silent, watching her as she fidgeted in front of the door, tracing that crack with a bright red fingernail.

“Yeah, I didn’t really listen to any of that. It sounded, like, boring as hell?” At last, almost reluctantly, she let his hair slip from her hand; a smooth and shining silken waterfall that flowed like a liquid through her fingers. She spun on her heel to face him, beaming a dangerous cheshire smile outlined in pale cherry lip gloss. “Is that your final answer? That… Darwinian evolutionary crap?”

“It’s the most scientifically relevant fact about the species.”

She tapped a finger against pursed lips. “Hm. Hmmmmm. Nope. You’ve got that wrong. Absolutely, hopelessly, despair-inducingly wrong, darling. Not even a little correct. The worst possible answer. How much moolah did Hope’s Peak shovel into your brain, again?”

“Then tell me, Junko,” he said in monotone, cutting her off by asking the question he knew she wanted him to, if only because otherwise she’d just keep tediously prodding him for it. “What is relevant about _biston betularia_?”

“WHY IZURU KAMUKURA MY PERFECT ANGEL OF DESPAIR, I AM SO GLAD YOU ASKED!!” Junko shrieked, and with one mighty stomp, kicked the door down. It had looked sturdy, but the frame splintered as if rotted, the hinges tore from the wall, the already cracked glass shattered. “THIS!!”

And a swarming wall of pale grey moths poured forth from the student records room.

Izuru threw up his arms automatically as they rushed past him down the hallway, desperate to escape their dark, underground prison, desperate to reach Chiaki and her distant golden light. Pelting him like hail, tiny pale bodies hurling themselves against the black of his suit in a teeming, mindless, buzzing flood. A million, billion ash-grey wings blinding him, crawling chaotically under his clothes, tangling themselves in his hair. Somewhere far away, Junko howled with joyous schadenfreude and screamed: “Was E.T. too _subtle_ for you, Hajime? Was Chiaki too careful of that fragile fourth wall? _It’s! FUCKING!! SYMBOLISM!!!”_

________________

 

Izuru Kamukura woke writhing, screaming and striking wildly at his own hair as if it was still swarming with moths.

Almost instantly, he froze. Half a dozen Ultimate martial artists surfaced, produced a plethora of meditative techniques, and in seconds Izuru had slowed his pulse, restored the rhythm of his breathing. He was lying on a futon, hopelessly tangled in his own hair and in sweat-soaked sheets, and as he opened his eyes a wave of information hit him automatically, orienting him and realigning him with the rest of reality. The dream was unimportant, irrelevant, illogical.

Pertinent fact number one, offered the slow, throbbing headache at his temples: he still had a concussion. Whatever accelerated healing Hope’s Peak’s forceps and scalpels had gifted him with, it wasn’t going to fix a traumatic brain injury in a day. (Unfortunate, but expected.) Slowly, experimentally, he tried sitting up, and was not met with the dizziness of the night before, did not lose his train of thought to pain. The headache remained consistent, unaffected by the motion. (Better, at least. It _is_ healing.)

Fact number two: the house he found himself in belonged to Old Money. His eyes took in the small guest room that contained his sickbed; tatami mats over richly stained wood flooring, elegant screen partitions, futon and table in the traditional Japanese style intermingling with side tables and a large dresser of European design. (The dresser is French, Régence period, if the intricate, scalloped carving is any indication, provided the Ultimate Appraiser. The rest, a very expensive reproduction.) The picture it painted him of the rest of the house was a large traditional Japanese mansion, probably somewhere rural. A family with lofty connections in the west and more money than taste - but just _enough_ taste to come across as deliberate in their decor. A calculated show of wealth, power, and sophistication, the aesthetics of which were secondary. A family who, judging by the fine layer of dust dulling every surface, had been gone from this house for a very long time.

(Kuzuryu Clan,) determined Izuru after approximately five seconds. An unusual show of trust and vulnerability from Fuyuhiko, if he was correct, but not a surprising one, given their circumstances. It would be in the yakuza’s nature to hide out somewhere and heal.

Fact three: he’d been asleep for seventeen hours, forty five minutes, and three seconds. His internal clock, accurate to the millisecond, provided that, despite the table clock on the dresser having long ago wound down somewhere around one thirty. It was three in the afternoon. Light glowed warmly through the sliding screens along one wall of the room. (Golden hour light, a dusting of red-orange-gold on the shoulders of a girl sitting on the edge of a fountain. His own reflection in the screen of her Game Girl, short brown hair and hazel eyes.)

The world spun, briefly, and Izuru put a hand to his temple, touched his hair. (Junko’s hand sweeping through it, a five foot waterfall of dark silk.) It was not silky now. His hand was met by a tangled, greasy Gordian knot, and came away smeared with black. An oily slurry of soot and plaster and blood and grease and sweat. He stared at it, blankly. There was a strange pressure in his head.

Fact four: his hair was filthy.

His hair was _filthy_. He was suddenly, _viscerally_ aware of that. It didn’t feel like it was his. This five foot _thing_ pressed against his back, a dead, dragging weight, like the desiccated corpse of a dead animal clinging to his scalp, bristly and foul and coated in _literal years_ of filth. (No, be reasonable. Most of that is from the gauntlet you ran last night. Calm down.) He wiped his hands on the futon, noting the long black stains he’d already left there just from lying on it. (From your skin as well, and your suit. You’re coated in soot from the fire. Whoever dragged it out for you certainly doesn’t mind. Calm down.)

He did not calm down. How had he ever let it get this bad? How had he ever thought this was _logical_ , that the tedium of washing and brushing his hair once in a while outweighed not having this mire trailing behind him? (Calm down. No, I am, I’m calm. I just need to wash my hair. I just _need to wash my hair oh my god how long has my hair been like this I need to wash my hair calm DOWN_ )

He was scrambling for that glowing wall, sliding back one of the screens before he’d even really made a concrete decision to move. The wooden walkway outside was open to the air: a thin, raised hallway beneath the eaves of a wide roof, overlooking an overgrown garden. Izuru stumbled out into it and nearly tripped over Peko Pekoyama, who was on her hands and knees duteously scrubbing dirt from the long abandoned boards. He caught himself on a support pillar, breathing heavily. (Slow your breathing, calm down. You’re concussed, you’re not reacting logically, you need to calm down.)

Peko looked up at him, startled, and something calculating in Izuru took note that she’d A) deliberately positioned herself outside his room so that she’d be the first to know if he woke up, and B) definitely heard him scream a moment ago, and had made absolutely no attempt to check in on him. He automatically filed that under Potentially Useful Data on the Priorities and Loyalties of Peko Pekoyama. “Izuru,” she said, uncertainly, warily, ever on edge. “I don’t think you should be out of bed.”

“Bathroom,” he managed, his voice sounding like a stranger’s. “I’m… I’ll go back to bed, I just… bathroom.”

Still staring, she raised a hand and pointed down the walkway.

“There’s… is there running water? Do we have water here?”

Peko nodded slowly.

“Right. Thanks.”

“What are you doing with your face?” she asked, and Izuru swung an arm in an ambivalent gesture of duress.

“Can everyone just _stop asking me that?”_

Still dangerously unsteady (but at least able to stand up on his own now, so that was another improvement) Izuru staggered along the walkway, bedraggled hair clinging to his back and brushing his skin with every step. (Calm down. It’s just your hair. It’s always been there. Calm down.)

The bathroom was about what he’d expected. Built in the same era as the rest of the house, so the tub was a large and luxurious wooden thing and the tile was polished stone, but the shower had been renovated in the last decade with modern fixtures of stainless steel. He couldn’t quite parse why every shelf and surface was covered in colorful plastic bottles: what looked like the entire shampoo and conditioner inventory of a 100 yen shop, or perhaps a few dozen 100 yen shops. They looked newer than everything else, and they certainly didn’t match the aesthetic. Part of him found that extremely interesting, wanted to puzzle it out. The rest of him _really_ just wanted a shower.

He didn’t bother to fill the bathtub beforehand. He didn’t even bother to take his clothes off. Just grabbed the handheld showerhead and turned the water on as scalding hot as he could possibly make it and collapsed onto one of the little wooden shower stools and sat there, curled in on himself, the showerhead pointed at his hairline and torrid water cascading off of him and making long trails of grime go creeping across the tile.

At some point the gauze from his forehead drifted past, washed away along with a thin trail of blood.

(Blood on the tile.) That strange pressure pushed against the inside of his skull like it was trying to break through it. Not the headache, not a pain of any kind. Something else, something unsettling, something alien. Somehow, mentally, he pushed back against it. (Calm down. Calm down. Calm down.) He inhaled. Exhaled. Caught his breath again, guided it back into something steady. The pressure receded.

Okay.

That entire escapade had been absolutely, inanely, pointlessly overdramatic. He was clearly still experiencing waves of disorientation. The logical thing to do would be to turn off the shower, change out of these wet clothes, and go directly back to bed to sleep this off for another thirty-some hours.

That Peko Pekoyama was present, and that this house belonged, probably legally, to Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu, told him a number of things, not the least of which being who he was boarding with and said yakuza’s exact opinions on the state of his health.

(I’m certainly not here for a _sleepover_. I’d call him irrational for thinking he couldn’t just drop me off somewhere, but after that… episode, he’s probably justified in keeping an eye on me.) Izuru rubbed his forehead carefully, hot water streaming around his fingers. Felt where the split in his scar, half-healed, had scabbed over. With the initial panic out of the way, his eyes were starting to feel heavy, that dull throb in the back of his head a little too insistent. (That episode that Peko’s definitely going to report to him, and he’s definitely going to overreact to. That conversation’s going to be… tiring.) Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu was too empathetic for his own good, and his concern manifested annoyingly often as anger. (Possibly, I can sleep until he’s blown off enough steam ranting at Peko instead of me. I just need to go back to bed.)

He reached out to turn the shower off. Gritty black water swept past him in a steady stream, and his hair clung wetly to his clothes and skin, a dead animal now slimy, slick and rotting.

He didn’t turn the shower off.


End file.
